A thought from gregory of nyssa

Now if man came into existence for this purpose – namely to be made a partaker of the divine goodness, he must have been created with a propensity for sharing in that goodness. In the case of physical sight the eye partakes of light by virtue of a beam of light with which the eye itself is endowed by nature; this innate power enables it to attract to itself that which is akin to its own nature. In the same way something akin to the divine had to be included in human nature, so that by virtue of that relationship man would have a desire for that which corresponds to his own nature. In the case of creatures without reason, animals whose natural habitat is the water or the air are formed with natures corresponding to their pattern of life; the particular way their bodies are constructed in each case makes air or water, as a case may be, natural and congenial to them. So, since man was created for the purpose of enjoying the divine goodness, he had to have something in his nature akin to that of which he was designed to partake. He was therefore endowed with life and reason and wisdom and all the other good things which are characteristic of God so that each of these might provide him with a desire for something which is related to his own nature. Now since one of the good things that belongs to divine nature is eternity, it would not have been right for the constitution of our nature to have had no share in that whatever; there is therefore within man’s nature an immortal element so that by virtue of this inherent capacity he might recognize the transcendent and come to long for the divine eternity.

The account of the creation sums all this up in a single phrase when it says that man was created in the image of God [Genesis 1:27]. For the likeness which consists in being in the image of God is a summation of all the characteristically divine attributes. And everything that Moses goes on to relate in his narrative account (for that is the form in which he presents us with his doctrine) has the same teaching in view. The garden of which he speaks and the peculiarity of the fruit which does not satisfy the belly when eaten but which gives knowledge and eternal life – all these are in full accord with what we have already seen about man: namely that in its origins our nature was good and was surrounded by goodness.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa