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And, I understand the "image and likeness" attempt, but the detailed descriptions were far beyond this level.

I think the problem faced by anyone who draws or tries to draw conclusions from Scripture is doping out when the last tether was cut and the craft started drifting randomly -- if you take my meaning.

As I rushed through Fr. Hardon's stuff, when I see "deiform" I just think, okay, that's a Latinate way of referring to man's being made in the image and likeness (hereinafter "I+L"). So I don't have the sense of hitting a wall that you had (I'm guessing) when you ran across that word. So I have to go back and see what I missed.

I was struck with the, let's say,"enthusiasm" of the first part of Hardon's description. But I think he pulls it out of the fire when he says:

The body goes quickly to the things of sense; the mind goes more slowly to things of the spirit. Thus, there are roots of disorder in man’s very nature. St. Paul spoke so eloquently of this battle, this conflict in man (Rom. 7). In Adam, God did not remove the disorderly tendencies, but by the gift of integrity He put in him a principle of control.

IF I understand him, he's saying that of unfallen man.

So, if that's right, to sum up the first part is to say that by the grace of his creation, by the grace of his "right relationship" (itself a gift) to God, Adam has many other graces which follow, like holiness. He also has graces that are (Hardon says) praeternatural, graces such that creatures (like angels) might be given.

(I hit a wall at impassibility. I don't see why unfallen man would not suffer, and I would want clarification here.)

So, two things: one is that a lot of this seems to be just drawing out what a man, an animal that can think and choose, is and what would be the case if such a creature had no history of sin. When Hardon writes of "a principle of control" that seems to answer to my experience. The "higher" thing for me is to watch my diet because it's good to take care of the body God gave me. Because of the Fall, my "principle of control" is out of whack. When I ride my bicycle where the aroma of hot oil from all the fast food places assaults my nose, I know how weak my principle of control is.

But I can imagine unfallen Adam saying,"Yeah, smells great. No thanks."

And deiformity seems to me to be not SO bad a term. "You are gods," quotes IHS. And John says, "We will be like him for we shall see him as he is." And remember, when we say "form" we don't mean shape, we mean something like principle. One might say the "Form" of a chair is "sit-on-ability." So man's deiformity would be something like thinking and choosing and loving spiritual things-ability. And it's approximate because we can't create stuff, including ideas (true ones,anyway), because it is in every respect derivative, while God's form is what he is, AND it is, "adjusted" to suit an animal who feeds and breeds.

So to me,the TERM "deiform" just is shorthand for I+L. And then all the stuff Hardon says about it is not found in scripture any more (or any less) than Euclid's proof of the Pythagorean Theorem is found in his definitions and axiomata.

I guess my hope is that if you hack your way through my verbiage, you can find the question or two that skewers the whole thing OR you can comment on the different turns I take in the road and say why you would have turned the other way.