32 and relationship to God and comprises the entire framework of meaning for his life as well as the arc of his entire activity. To be created in the image of God to become like him, that is for Pallotti simultaneously the special expression of the Love of God and a unique dignity, but also a challenge to the creature. God created humans out of pure love in order to pour himself into them. Being a creature is an unmerited gift of God. The more a human being starts to understand this, the more the resulting obligation becomes clear. The love of God effects at the same time the election and calling of the human being. Being a creature, being an image of God is, therefore, not only the beginning and origin, but also the goal and fulfi llment of his life. Pallotti draws the entire program of his life out of this conviction. Pallotti says that it is the faith that teaches him, that he and all people are created as the image and likeness of God out of love and mercy, and are his created in his likeness. In doing so, he refers in the fi rst instance not to his knowledge of the catechism or the content of his studies, but to his insight into the faith, an experience that is vitally present in him.40 Here, already, a decisive and original connection for Pallotti’s spirituality shows itself, between refl ection and theology on the one hand, and the lived faith, theopraxis, on the other. This will need to be developed more later on. It is only with a view to God that Pallotti learns to understand himself and he fi nds in equal measure challenge as well as motivation and task. It is to enter into an interior development, which brings this image of God in him to fulfi lment, in an almost unbearable tension between the presence of the infi nite God and his inability to comply with him and to answer him fi ttingly. This path is a process of dialogue with God, who communicates himself and gives himself to his creatures, but at the same time remains infi nitely removed, totally there and yet totally hidden. Pallotti believes this presence of God to be at work in him and in all creatures gifted with reason. Therefore, he wants to revere God himself in human beings and to seek him in no other place than there, where his living image is present. What in Pallotti’s case can here be referred to as Image-Theology is not simply identical with the Pictorial Theology, developed in the past years, which deals with the connection between religion and images and, therefore, primarily if not exclusively, with the phenomenon of the pictorial arts. There are certainly points of contact and linkages that encourage further development. At any rate, it becomes clear that a drawing near to the Image 40 Cf. i.e. OOCC IV, 172: „L'Uomo è creato, come c'insegna la S. Fede, ad imagine e similitudine di Dio [...]” or OOCC IV, 221 and other passages.
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