Abstract
When describing cognitive processes by which knowledge of a ‘highest’ or ‘divine’ truth is supposed to be conveyed, ancient philosophical texts often draw on spatial metaphors, in which they locate this process ‘inside’ the human person. Here the question will be pursued of which spatial metaphors are used by Augustine to describe the process of discovering knowledge in De trinitate. Augustine works on the assumption that man is created, after Genesis 1:27, “in the image of God” and hence the imago dei is present as a kind of structure in the ‘inner man’. Through the ‘blending’ of the non-metaphorical concept of the image of God with the image of man that had been developed through spatial metaphors, Augustine developed his – for ancient theory of knowledge, new, distinctive and highly influential – ‘theological epistemology’ and an ‘onto-theology of the image’.