Consequence and Provision: The Two-Fold Character

The central claim of Nellas’s most influential chapter is that the garments of skin have a two-fold character: they are at once the consequence of sin and a merciful provision of God within the fallen condition. Mortality, biological reproduction, marriage, family, law, property, politics — all belong to the world of the fall, and all are given within that world as blessings and means of salvation, on one condition: that God remains the end for which they are used. Treated as autonomous, they work to man’s harm.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Claim

The third division of Nellas’s chapter is headed simply “The two-fold character of the garments of skin” (Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 60–63). It is the hinge on which the whole doctrine turns, and the reason the motif has been usable by later writers rather than remaining a piece of ascetic rhetoric.

The claim can be stated as a pair of propositions held together:

(a) The garments are a consequence of sin. They are not part of human nature as created. Mortality, and everything mortality entails, entered by the fall. To describe present human existence — biological, appetitive, competitive, subject to law and to death — as though it were simply “human nature” is to mistake the wound for the body.

(b) The garments are a gift. God clothed them. The act of Genesis 3:21 is an act of mercy, not a further sentence. The new mode of existence is given so that fallen man can survive, can be preserved, and can be brought back — so that sin should not become immortal and so that the creature should have a field in which to live and repent.

Neither proposition may be dropped. Drop (a) and you sanctify the fallen order and lose the very possibility of critique. Drop (b) and you get a Christianity of flight, in which the body, the family, the city and the economy are simply enemies.

The rule that governs their use follows: the garments serve salvation as long as God is the ultimate end of the endeavour, and they work to man’s harm if they are treated as autonomous — as ends in themselves rather than as means and as clothing (Nellas 1987, 60–63; the position as summarised in the modern literature on his use of the motif).

Why This Is the Fruitful Move

The two-fold reading does specific work that neither half could do alone.

It explains ambivalence without incoherence. Marriage, in the Orthodox tradition, is a Mystery of the Church and a road to sanctification — and also belongs to the fallen mode of human propagation which the resurrection will supersede (“in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” Matthew 22:30). Wealth is a divine gift and a mortal danger. The state restrains evil and is itself a chronic source of it. The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and the seat of the passions. A theology with only one register has to choose; Nellas’s does not.

It gives asceticism a rationale that is not contempt. If the garment is a divine provision, then the ascetic’s fasting, celibacy and voluntary poverty are not the rejection of an evil but the anticipation of a condition in which the provision will no longer be needed. The monk does not despise marriage; he lives already, imperfectly, in the mode of the resurrection. This is precisely how the Greek ascetic tradition understands itself (see Orthodox Monasticism).

It makes culture theologically intelligible. Law, art, politics, technology, economy — the whole of what human beings build — are, on Gregory of Nyssa’s comprehensive reading, part of the garments. They are therefore neither the natural flowering of the imago Dei nor a mere distraction from salvation. They are equipment for a wounded creature, capable of serving his healing and capable of becoming his prison. This is a considerably more useful framework than either Christian triumphalism about culture or Christian suspicion of it.

Transformation, Not Abolition

The corollary that Nellas presses hardest is that the garments are to be transformed, not simply removed.

The logic is christological. Christ assumed the whole of fallen human nature, sin excepted: He was born, hungered, thirsted, wept, suffered and died. He did not decline the garments; He put them on, and in putting them on He turned them. Death, assumed by the immortal One, becomes the instrument of the destruction of death. Mortality is not deleted from human nature; it is passed through and made a passage. The Church’s Paschal proclamation — that Christ trampled down death by death — is the pattern of what happens to every garment (see Christology and Soteriology).

From which follows the shape of the Christian life in Nellas’s account. What is asked is not the shedding of the biological and cultural condition but its reference to God, its use toward the end for which man exists, and thereby its transfiguration. The fallen powers, as Maximus taught, are turned originals; being turned, they can be turned back (see The Motif in Nyssa and Maximus).

This is why Nellas’s anthropology, for all its insistence on the fall, is not world-denying, and why Doru Costache pairs him with Fr Dumitru Stăniloae as thinkers for whom the patristic mind is “continuous, living, and meaningful” and the world is not an obstacle (Costache, “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration: The Anthropological Thinking of Panayiotis Nellas,” AIOCS, 27 April 2018; see Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae).

Church and World

Nellas draws the consequences in the final chapter of Part One (Nellas 1987, 93–108).

If the structures of ordinary life are consequence-and-provision, then the Church cannot take either of the two available shortcuts in relating to the world. She cannot identify with the social order, blessing the present arrangement as though it were the natural human condition; that would be to forget proposition (a). Nor can she withdraw from it, treating the ordinary business of human life as beneath the Gospel; that would be to forget proposition (b). What is required is engagement with a critical edge — the use of the world’s structures with a persistent memory that they are garments (see Social Ethics).

It is worth noting the resonance with the concerns of Paul Evdokimov, who directed Nellas’s Paris work on the theological foundations of monastic life, and who wrote at length on marriage, on the sanctification of secular life, and on “interiorised monasticism” — the monastic vocation lived in the world (see Paul Evdokimov and Paris, the Arsakeio, and an Early Death). This collection notes the affinity of theme and does not claim a demonstrated dependence, which the sources do not establish.

The Limits of What Nellas Built

Three honest qualifications.

The social theology is a sketch. Chapter III occupies some fifteen pages and gestures at a programme rather than executing one. Nellas died at fifty with the programme unwritten. Readers who come to him expecting a developed Orthodox social ethic will not find it.

The exegesis is a theologoumenon. The two-fold reading of Genesis 3:21 is a patristic interpretation elaborated by a modern theologian. It is not a conciliar definition, and this collection does not present it as one. The Church’s dogma is the fall, the consequent mortality, and the healing of human nature in Christ; the reading of the garments as comprising the whole cultural order is theological work built upon that dogma (repository METHODOLOGY §4.1).

There is a real question about scope that no one has pressed in print. If law, art and politics are garments of skin, one may ask whether human creativity has any positive theological ground independent of the fall — whether, that is, the doctrine makes culture merely remedial. Nellas’s own answer would presumably run through the image of God and the vocation of the human being as the priest of creation, and Part Three’s cosmology points that way. But he did not address the objection, and this collection has located no published critic who raised it. It is flagged as an open question, not attributed to anyone.

See Also

• The Motif in Nyssa and Maximus — the patristic sources of the doctrine
• Anthropology by Destiny — the wider engagement with modern anthropologies that this doctrine makes possible
• Cabasilas and the Sacramental Life — how the garments are actually transformed
• St. Maximus the Confessor — the transformation of the powers
• Paul Evdokimov — the director of his Paris work, and a theologian of the sanctification of ordinary life
• Social Ethics — the field on which the Church–world chapter bears
• Orthodox Monasticism — the ascetic life understood as anticipation rather than contempt

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.3, “The two-fold character of the garments of skin,” 60–63; ch. II.4, 64–92; ch. III, 93–108.)
• Gregory of Nyssa. On the Making of Man; On the Soul and the Resurrection; On Virginity.
• Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua; Questions to Thalassius.
• Costache, Doru. “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration: The Anthropological Thinking of Panayiotis Nellas.” AIOCS (aiocs.net), 27 April 2018.
• Genesis 3:21; Matthew 22:30.