The Motif in Nyssa and Maximus

The “garments of skin” of Genesis 3:21 are not, in the Greek patristic reading, an item of clothing. St Gregory of Nyssa takes them for mortality itself and everything that comes with it; St Maximus the Confessor reads the post-lapsarian human constitution as a transformation of powers that were given before the fall for another use. Nellas’s chapter is built from both, and its originality lies in the combination — Nyssen’s comprehensiveness with Maximus’s account of transformation.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Verse and the Problem

Genesis 3:21: “And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin [χιτῶνας δερματίνους], and clothed them.”

The verse is a small oddity in the narrative. It comes after the sentence of mortality and immediately before the expulsion from paradise; it describes an act of God that is plainly for the man and woman rather than against them, and it does so in a narrative whose other divine acts at this point are judgements. The Greek Fathers who read it allegorically were responding to a real textual pressure: why does the account of the curse contain an act of clothing?

The exegesis that developed reads the garments as the new mode of existence that God gave to man after the fall — not an addition to an unchanged nature, but the form human life took once it had lost immortality. The tradition is old and wide; Nellas works with its two greatest representatives.

St Gregory of Nyssa: The Garments as Mortality and Its Train

For Gregory of Nyssa the garments of skin are, first and fundamentally, mortality. Man was not created for death; having chosen against the Life, he received a nature that dies, and the “skin” is the dead animal hide — the sign that man has become a creature whose life is now sustained by death (Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection; On the Making of Man; On Virginity).

What Gregory does with this, and what makes him indispensable to Nellas, is refuse to stop at biology. Mortality does not arrive alone. A creature who dies must reproduce, must eat, must grow and decline, must defend what he has; and a society of such creatures must have law, property, marriage, family, politics and economy. Gregory’s own enumerations are famously concrete: sexual union, conception, childbirth, dirt, nursing, food, excrement, the gradual growth of the body toward maturity, adulthood, old age, sickness, and death (Gregory of Nyssa, as summarised in the standard accounts of the motif; and see St. Gregory of Nyssa).

The comprehensiveness is the point. In Gregory’s reading — and this is the sense in which Nellas takes it up — the garments of skin “stand for mortality and all that goes with it,” and that includes law, family life, political and economic life (Gregory of Nyssa’s position as stated in the modern summaries of Nellas’s use of him; Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, ch. II.1, “The general anthropological content,” 44–52).

This produces a single category that covers an extraordinary range: the biology of the human animal, the psychology of the passions, and the whole apparatus of human culture. It also produces the interpretive problem that occupies the rest of the chapter, since it is obviously not the case that marriage and law and childbirth are simply evils.

The Prelapsarian Powers and Their Transformation

The second division of Nellas’s chapter is headed “The transformation of the prelapsarian powers” (Nellas 1987, 53–59), and here the governing Father is St Maximus the Confessor.

Maximus’s account of the fall is not that man acquired new faculties but that his existing ones were redirected and reconstituted. The powers given for the movement of the creature toward God — desire (epithymia), the incensive faculty (thymos), and the whole natural energy of the human nature — were not created evil and are not abolished by the fall; they are turned. Desire, made for God, attaches to the sensible; the incensive power, made for the defence of the good, becomes aggression; the gnomic will, the mode of deliberating and choosing proper to a creature uncertain of the good, arises as a condition of the fallen state rather than as an original endowment (Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua; Questions to Thalassius; see St. Maximus the Confessor).

Maximus also describes the fallen constitution in terms of a change in the qualities of which the human composite is made — a passage from a temperament of simple, mutually compatible qualities to one of contrary qualities in tension, and therefore of constant change and eventual dissolution (Maximus, on the post-lapsarian “qualities” that are mutually contradictory, contrasted with “another temperament which befitted it, a temperament maintained by simple qualities compatible with each other … free from constant change”).

Two consequences follow that Nellas needs:

Nothing in fallen man is simply foreign matter. Because the fallen faculties are transformed originals rather than new acquisitions, they are candidates for re-transformation. The ascetic tradition’s whole programme — the redirection of desire toward God, the turning of the incensive power against the passions rather than against one’s brother — presupposes exactly this.

The direction of transformation is reversible in Christ. What was turned can be turned back, and Christ, assuming the whole of fallen human nature except sin, is the one in whom the turning back happens. Maximus’s christology and his anthropology are a single argument, and it is this that makes him the natural partner for Nyssen in a book whose thesis is that the archetype of man is the incarnate Logos.

What Nellas Made of the Combination

Nellas’s chapter is not a doxography of the two Fathers; it is a construction from them. Three things are his own contribution.

He made the motif comprehensive and systematic. In Gregory the garments are a recurring image deployed in several works for several purposes; in Maximus the transformation of the powers is embedded in a vast and difficult corpus. Nellas turned the material into a single organised doctrine of the post-lapsarian condition, with divisions, and set it inside a systematic anthropology. That act of organisation is why the phrase became usable by later writers.

He gave the doctrine an anthropological rather than an ascetic centre of gravity. The garments-of-skin material had generally functioned in the tradition within ascetic and monastic discourse — as an account of why the body must be disciplined. Nellas moved it into the anthropology proper, where it answers the question of what human nature currently is, and extended it explicitly to culture, law, politics and economy.

He insisted on the two-fold character. This is the decisive move and the subject of the next file: the garments are simultaneously the consequence of sin and a merciful divine provision, and everything turns on holding both (Nellas 1987, ch. II.3, “The two-fold character of the garments of skin,” 60–63; see Consequence and Provision).

A Word on Fidelity

Whether Nellas’s synthesis is a faithful rendering of his Fathers or an organisation that they would not have recognised is a legitimate scholarly question, and this collection notes it rather than settling it.

The case for fidelity: every element in the construction is genuinely in the sources, the Fathers themselves treat the garments as merciful (the classic Nyssen point that mortality is given so that sin should not be immortal), and reading two Fathers together to produce a doctrine neither states alone is what patristic theology has always done.

The case for caution: Gregory and Maximus are separated by more than two centuries and by different problems; Gregory’s garments-of-skin passages are often polemically or ascetically situated in ways a systematic reading flattens; and the extension of the motif to political and economic structures, while a reasonable inference from Gregory’s enumerations, is more explicit in Nellas than in the sources.

This collection has found no published Orthodox critic who presses the second case against Nellas in print (see The Critical Literature). The question is noted here as one a serious reader should hold open, not as an objection anyone has actually made.

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; the divisions at 44, 53, 60 and 64.)
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Making of Man (De hominis opificio); On the Soul and the Resurrection; On Virginity. (The garments of skin as mortality and its consequences.)
Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua; Questions to Thalassius. (The transformation of the prelapsarian powers and the post-lapsarian temperament of contrary qualities.)
Genesis 3:21.
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
Costache, Doru. “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration: The Anthropological Thinking of Panayiotis Nellas.” AIOCS (aiocs.net), 27 April 2018.