06 — The Garments of Skin
“And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin, and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21). Read with St Gregory of Nyssa and St Maximus the Confessor, those δερμάτινοι χιτῶνες denote the whole post-lapsarian mode of human existence — mortality, biological birth and death, the passions, and the structures of law, family, economy and politics that mortality makes necessary. Nellas’s treatment of the motif is his most distinctive and most influential piece of work, and it turns on a single claim: the garments are at once the consequence of sin and a gift of divine mercy, and are therefore to be transformed rather than simply abolished.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Motif in Nyssa and Maximus | Genesis 3:21 and its patristic exegesis; Gregory of Nyssa on the garments as mortality and its whole train; Maximus on the transformation of the prelapsarian powers; what Nellas took from each and how he combined them |
| Consequence and Provision | The “two-fold character”: the garments as both punishment and mercy; the rule that they destroy when treated as autonomous and save when referred to God; the transformation rather than abolition of the biological; the consequences for the Church’s relation to the world |
Where It Sits in the Book
The material occupies Part One, chapter II of Deification in Christ, pages 43–92, in four divisions: the general anthropological content (44), the transformation of the prelapsarian powers (53), the two-fold character of the garments of skin (60), and the anthropological and cosmological dimensions (64). Chapter III (93) then draws out the consequences for the relation of Church and world (contents of Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987).
That placement is significant. The garments come after the chapter on the image of God and the christological archetype, not before. Nellas first establishes what the human being is — the image of the Image, made for the incarnate Logos — and only then describes the condition in which the human being is actually found. The order is not chronological but definitional: you cannot know what has gone wrong with a creature until you know what it is for.
The Reason This Section Exists Separately
Of everything Nellas wrote, the treatment of the garments of skin is the part that has entered the general vocabulary of Orthodox anthropology in English. The motif is not his invention — it is Nyssen’s and Maximus’s, and it has a long history in Greek and Syriac exegesis — but the sustained modern development of it as a category for theological anthropology, capable of organising an account of mortality, sexuality, culture, law and politics at once, is substantially his work, and later writers who use the phrase are generally using it in the sense he gave it.
It is also the part of his work with the clearest practical purchase. An Orthodox reader trying to think about marriage, or work, or the state, or the body, without either sacralising the present order or fleeing it, has in this doctrine a usable instrument.
A Note on Dogmatic Status
The Church confesses the fall, its consequences, and the mortality that entered human life through sin. She confesses that Christ has assumed and healed human nature, and that the Christian is called to the transfiguration and not the abandonment of the body.
The specific exegesis of Genesis 3:21 developed here — the identification of the garments with the whole post-lapsarian mode including its cultural and political structures, and the two-fold reading of them as consequence-and-provision — is a patristic theologoumenon received and elaborated by Nellas, not a conciliar definition. It is expounded here as the theological work of the Fathers named and of Nellas after them (repository METHODOLOGY §4.1).
See Also
- The Deified Animal — the definition that this doctrine of the present condition presupposes
- Christ the Archetype of the Human — the chapter that precedes this one in the book
- St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Maximus the Confessor — the patristic sources
- Theological Anthropology — the Church’s doctrine of man, the image, and the fall
- Social Ethics — where the Church–world consequences bear
References
- Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. Norman Russell. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. (Part One, ch. II, 43–92.)
- Gregory of Nyssa. On the Making of Man; On the Soul and the Resurrection; On Virginity.
- Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua; Questions to Thalassius.
- Genesis 3:21.