The second kind of image is that foreknowledge which is in God's mind concerning future events, His eternal and unchanging counsel. God is immutable and His counsel without beginning, and as it has been determined from all eternity, it is carried out at the time preordained by Him. Images and figures of what He is to do in the future, the distinct determination of each, are called predeterminations by holy Dionysius. In His counsels the things predetermined by Him were characterised and imaged and immutably fixed before they took place.
The third sort of image is that by imitation ({ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA U+03ba~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA U+03b1~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU U+03c4~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH VARIA U+1f70~} { ~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU U+03bc~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH TONOS U+03af~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU U+03bc~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA U+03b7~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA U+03c3~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA U+03b9~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU U+03bd~}) which God made, that is, man. For how can what is created be of the same nature as what is uncreated, except by imitation? As mind, the Father, the Word, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one God, so mind and word and spirit are one man, according to God's will and sovereign rule.
For God says: 'Let us make man according to our own image and likeness,' and He adds, 'and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the birds of the air, and the whole earth, and rule over it.'
The fourth kind of image are the figures and types set forth by Scripture of invisible and immaterial things in bodily form, for a clearer apprehension of God and the angels, through our incapacity of perceiving immaterial things unless clothed in analogical material form, as Dionysius the Areopagite says, a man skilled in divine things. Anyone would say that our incapacity for reaching the contemplation of intellectual things, and our need of familiar and cognate mediums, make it necessary that immaterial things should be clothed in form and shape. If, then, holy Scripture adapts itself to us in seeking to elevate us above sense, does it not make images of what it clothes in our own medium, and bring within our reach that which we desire but are unable to see? The spiritual[23] writer, Gregory, says that the mind striving to banish corporeal images reduces itself to incapability. But from the creation of the world the invisible things of God are made clear by the visible creation. We see images in created things, which remind us faintly of divine tokens. For instance, sun and light and brightness, the running waters of a perennial fountain, our own mind and language and spirit, the sweet fragrance of a flowering rose-tree, are images of the Holy and Eternal Trinity.