One helpful viewpoint can be found in David Bentley Hart's book, The Beauty of the Infinite, where he gives us his take on it:
“What, indeed, is the Christian understanding of the soul? What is the imago Dei, and how does it resemble God? There is no entirely adequate answer to such questions, but any of worth will look nothing like the "subject" lost in the ruins of modern metaphysics.
For example: the tendency to take Augustine as in some sense the father of the modern subject and the most perfect exemplar of the onto-theologian proceeds from a fairly maladroit exegesis of texts like the Confessions and De Trinitate, one which finds in their pages simply the story of God and the soul, two discrete substances whose mutual regard insures the meaningfulness of being as a whole.
If this reading were essentially correct, one would expect to find in either text Augustine's discovery of a stable subject, an appropriable identity present to itself, a singularity transcendent of time's motion; there would have to be some still point at which, in traversing the inward interval, one finally arrives; but this is precisely what Augustine never discovers.
The interiority that opens up in the Confessions possesses no center in itself, nor does it depend upon an idea in relation to which it is a shadow tormented by its simulacral drift; instead, it is an infinitely revisable, multiplicit, self-contradictory text, whose creaturely contingency is restless in its longing, founded in nothing, and open to what it cannot own by nature.
Memoria appears for Augustine - even in this fairly early text, written when the language of Neoplatonism still sprang easily to his lips - not as Platonic anamnesis, but as an open space filled with more music than it can contain, constantly "decentering" itself, transcending itself not toward an idea it grasps or simply "resembles," but toward an infinite it longs for despite its incapacity to contain the infinite; it is an interiority in which every mere "self" is swallowed up by an infinite desire.
To cross this "moral" interval is not to transcend the accidental so as to arrive at the substantial, but is rather perpetually to transcend any fixed identity: a transcendence which is always more transcendent, an infinite scope within the self that no self can comprise, and to which the self belongs.
The imago Dei is not simply a possession of the soul so much as a future, a hope; the self forever displaced and exceeded by its desire for God is a self displaced toward an image it never owns as a "substance."
Thus, within himself Augustine finds no place to stand, nor does he glimpse above him a higher self, an idea that serves as the ontological treasure stored up for him in heaven, guaranteeing his identity; but he does see a light that embraces him as it shapes him - without need - as a vessel of its glory. Even in De Trinitate's most "metaphysical" moments, the image of God is precisely that which cannot be fixed and cannot lend stability to a unified "ego," because it is a trinitarian image, whose plurality does not correspond to "hierarchical" aspects of the soul (this is a Christian, not a Platonic, soul), but rather illuminates the soul as an interdependence of equally present but diverse energies, and so leaves the self in a state of circumvolving multiplicity.
The very meaning of the Confessions, after all, depends upon an understanding of the particular life, the particular self, as always reinterpretable; the soul is a story that can always be retold, subjected to new grammars, converted.
The Christian understanding of the soul is, of necessity, dynamic, multifarious, contradictory; no one more profoundly expressed this dynamism than Gregory of Nyssa, for whom the soul could be understood only as an rrkTaais, an always outstretched, open, and changing motion, an infinite exodus from nothingness into God's inexhaustible transcendence (in Kierkegaardian terms, repetition).
Theology need feel no pangs of conscience in this matter; for while Nietzsche simply draws a quasi-Platonic picture of the self as polity (or, as the case may be, anarchy), the Christian tradition substitutes for the Platonic soul something still more dynamic: an openness of the "self" before infinite being and infinite novelty.”
David Armstrong is also helpful, he writes HERE:
David Armstrong is also helpful, he writes HERE:
"Paul’s understanding of the self is also changeable. Paul measures human beings by their concentration of spirit (pneuma): some people are “spiritual,” while others are “psychics” and “sarkics” (1 Cor 2:10-13); the future body of the resurrection will not be “flesh and blood” but “spiritual,” in the sense that it will be composed of spirit (as opposed to the present body which is psychic—15:44-51).
But Paul—who uses a wide number of terms to characterize the human condition, including “spirit,” “psyche,” “flesh,” “blood,” “inner” and “outer” human, etc.—never identifies a single one with the “self,” something perennial which is identifiable with the person. For Paul, the resurrected human exists in a world where God, through Christ and the Spirit, has become “all in all” (15:28), completely filling all things with himself as their final content.....
Early Christian interpreters of the New Testament clearly articulate an unstable, dynamic, fluid self. As St. Athanasios puts it in On the Incarnation of the Word, the self and the world do not exist independently. This is why creation lapses back into nonbeing when communion with God is broken. "
You’ll have to read the whole thing HERE, but the main points :
"The purely subjective interiority of the Son, in its full depth, simply is the Father; the Father’s fully expressed exteriority simply is the Son; the perfect life and actuality of the Father and Son as personal simply is the Spirit.
…..this is not a statement about a reciprocal relation between two selves, but rather a structural description of the divine personhood.
The purely subjective interiority of the Son, in its full depth, simply is the Father; the Father’s fully expressed exteriority simply is the Son; the perfect life and actuality of the Father and Son as personal simply is the Spirit.
The Trinity is God as the hierarchy of the hidden and the manifest. Where God is disclosed, there is the Son.
God suffered, so to speak, in the mode of the Son, as the only proper mode in which God is reflectively present to himself and objectively present to us who live, move, and exist within the life of love and knowledge that he is.
The Father is that mode of being God who, as unexpressed and unmanifest in itself, is present to himself and to creation only in the Son, and who therefore does not suffer in himself.
The Spirit is the living presence of Father and Son to one another in the one divine life of love that, so to speak, eternally overcomes any abstract opposition of hiddenness and manifestation—such as that between the not-suffering of the Father and the suffering of the Son.
Or let us put it this way: when you experience pain, the always unmanifest source of your personal existence (we may call it nous or intellectus if we like, or the transcendental or apperceptive “I” if we prefer, or even Atman or Sakṣi if we are feeling a little daring and exotic) is not in itself either the agent or patient of that experience; only the empirical or psychological self is;
*and your existence as a rational spirit is the living unity of these truths that, in being made actual, constitutes you as a real subject.*
A distant, defective, wholly inadequate analogy of what happened in Christ, no doubt, as all analogies must be; even so, the not-suffering of the Father is more like that than like your not-suffering when I cut my finger.
All of which is to say that the language of “person” in Christian thought…must be a language grounded not simply in the threeness of the divine hypostases, but also, and no less securely, in the oneness of the divine essence understood as the “hypostasible” oneness of the divine Person who God is.
Bulgakov insists, some prior commonality in the human and divine natures, mediating and serving as the unalterable foundation of their union in Christ; and this he chooses to call Sophia, or Sophianicity, or Divine Humanity, or the pre-hypostatic “hypostasibility” of the divine essence as it is possessed in the Father—all of which is to say, that intrinsic movement of personhood that is always already the essential going forth of the Father, in the immanent divine life and then also in creation.
….one must postulate that same “primordial identity between the Divine I of the Logos and the human I.”
…the same Logos that is the ground of the self of Jesus of Nazareth is also the ground of every self; but in Jesus the self’s subjectivity—his psychological ego—is so perfectly transparent to that ground that there is no interval of otherness, no distance between the human I and the divine I.
Thus he is truly God incarnate. But thus too all human beings, who exist only as participating in that divine source of the I, are called to have their “selves” transformed into that very same transparency before their one shared divine ground.
Sophia, hypostasibility, Divine Humanity—what have you: it is that original commonality of the divine and the human logically prior to any differentiation of the two natures that is also the perfectly concordant commonality of those natures in act, even to the point of identity in one and the same person.
Only in God is the full depth of personhood fully known and fully loved and loving.
Each of us is in transit; each of us is always as yet becoming a person; and the “I” that we are always seeking to become is the “I” who the incarnate Logos always already is:
the human being who is wholly human in being wholly God, and who thereby entirely realizes the divine-human essence of our nature.
We truly become persons only in his person, as his person is the full expression of the one trihypostatic Person of God.
When that dependence on others that constitutes us as living subjects becomes an ultimate dependence on the person of the incarnate Logos, making his manifestation of the Father the object of our own subjectivities, we are transformed into what he is.,
Bulgakov echoes Gregory when he says that one becomes a true and actual “I” only in gazing upon the divine “I,” and thereby knowing oneself as the image and reflection of that divine sun.
…it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that there must be a point in his vision of things where the distinction between the language of image and archetype and that of a yet more original identity begins to seem at most merely formal, and even rather arbitrary.
What is astonishing and new in Bulgakov’s monism, given its Christological foundation, is the discovery that it is not merely possible and coherent but perhaps also necessary to say that, among the privileged names for this most original of principles, the highest of all is “person,” or even “the Person”: the one, that is, in whom all personhood has its existence and in which all things have their ground as personal—the one divine Person who is all that is, who shall in the end be all in all, and who alone is forever the “I am that I am” within every “I” that is.
Bulgakov insists, some prior commonality in the human and divine natures, mediating and serving as the unalterable foundation of their union in Christ; and this he chooses to call Sophia, or Sophianicity, or Divine Humanity, or the pre-hypostatic “hypostasibility” of the divine essence as it is possessed in the Father—all of which is to say, that intrinsic movement of personhood that is always already the essential going forth of the Father, in the immanent divine life and then also in creation.
….one must postulate that same “primordial identity between the Divine I of the Logos and the human I.”
…the same Logos that is the ground of the self of Jesus of Nazareth is also the ground of every self; but in Jesus the self’s subjectivity—his psychological ego—is so perfectly transparent to that ground that there is no interval of otherness, no distance between the human I and the divine I.
Thus he is truly God incarnate. But thus too all human beings, who exist only as participating in that divine source of the I, are called to have their “selves” transformed into that very same transparency before their one shared divine ground.
Sophia, hypostasibility, Divine Humanity—what have you: it is that original commonality of the divine and the human logically prior to any differentiation of the two natures that is also the perfectly concordant commonality of those natures in act, even to the point of identity in one and the same person.
Only in God is the full depth of personhood fully known and fully loved and loving.
Each of us is in transit; each of us is always as yet becoming a person; and the “I” that we are always seeking to become is the “I” who the incarnate Logos always already is:
the human being who is wholly human in being wholly God, and who thereby entirely realizes the divine-human essence of our nature.
We truly become persons only in his person, as his person is the full expression of the one trihypostatic Person of God.
When that dependence on others that constitutes us as living subjects becomes an ultimate dependence on the person of the incarnate Logos, making his manifestation of the Father the object of our own subjectivities, we are transformed into what he is.,
Bulgakov echoes Gregory when he says that one becomes a true and actual “I” only in gazing upon the divine “I,” and thereby knowing oneself as the image and reflection of that divine sun.
…it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that there must be a point in his vision of things where the distinction between the language of image and archetype and that of a yet more original identity begins to seem at most merely formal, and even rather arbitrary.
What is astonishing and new in Bulgakov’s monism, given its Christological foundation, is the discovery that it is not merely possible and coherent but perhaps also necessary to say that, among the privileged names for this most original of principles, the highest of all is “person,” or even “the Person”: the one, that is, in whom all personhood has its existence and in which all things have their ground as personal—the one divine Person who is all that is, who shall in the end be all in all, and who alone is forever the “I am that I am” within every “I” that is.
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