Nature Before the Fall

Fr. Seraphim Rose argues, following certain Church Fathers, that the world before the Fall of Adam was ontologically different from the world we now inhabit. Death, corruption, predation, and suffering entered the cosmos as consequences of the Fall — not just for humanity but for all of creation. Rose treats the “garments of skin” (Gen. 3:21) as a patristic key to understanding the cosmic change wrought by the Fall, and he opposes the uniformitarian assumption that the natural processes we observe today have always been the same.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (in its patristic sources); ROCOR-specific (in its emphasis and application)

The Pre-Fall World: Ontologically Different

Rose’s Central Argument

Rose’s most distinctive cosmological claim is that the pre-Fall creation was fundamentally different in its mode of existence from the post-Fall creation. This is not merely a difference of degree (less suffering, less death) but a difference of kind — the very fabric of the natural world was transformed by the Fall:

  • Before the Fall, the world existed in a state of grace, directly sustained by God’s life-giving presence. There was no death, no corruption, no decay, no predation, no suffering — not only for human beings but for the entire created order.
  • The Fall of Adam, as the head and priest of creation, brought catastrophic consequences not only upon humanity but upon the entire cosmos. Creation “fell” together with its head.
  • The world we now observe — with its laws of entropy, decay, predation, natural disaster, and death — is the fallen world, not the original creation as God intended it (Rose, Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, Part II).

Rose grounds this argument in the Apostle Paul’s teaching in Romans 8:19–22: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility (mataiotes), not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay (phthora) and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now.”

Rose reads this passage, with the Fathers, as teaching that the entire creation was subjected to corruption and futility as a result of human sin, and that the whole creation awaits redemption together with redeemed humanity.

Patristic Support

Several Fathers teach that the pre-Fall world was qualitatively different:

  • St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022): Rose draws heavily on St. Symeon’s teaching that before the Fall the whole creation was brought into being “incorruptible, yet material and perceptible,” and that after the Fall God “subjected it to corruption on account of man, and cursed it.” The passage is from St. Symeon’s First Ethical Discourse (Eth. Disc. 1.1–1.2). Rose’s wording follows his own translation in The First-Created Man: Seven Homilies of St. Symeon the New Theologian (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood) — itself rendered from St. Theophan the Recluse’s Russian, so it differs verbally from the direct Greek translation in Alexander Golitzin, On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses, vol. 1 (SVS Press, 1995), pp. 21–29; critical Greek text in Darrouzès, Traités théologiques et éthiques, SC 122.

  • St. John Chrysostom: Teaches that the curse on the ground (Gen. 3:17–18: “cursed is the ground because of you… thorns and thistles it shall bring forth”) represents a real change in the nature of the earth, not merely a subjective change in Adam’s experience of it. Chrysostom comments on Gen. 3:17–19 in his Homilies on Genesis 17 (“I curse the ground so that it will not in future yield its harvest as before without tilling”; trans. Robert C. Hill, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, FOTC 74).

  • St. Basil the Great: In his Hexaemeron, Basil describes the original creation as brought forth in perfect beauty and abundance at God’s command. Rose reads Basil as implying that the present state of nature — with its struggles, imperfections, and death — is a consequence of the Fall, not a feature of the original creation.

  • St. Ephrem the Syrian: Teaches that Paradise was a place of surpassing beauty and that the world outside Paradise, while created good, was still elevated above its present condition; the Fall brought a diminishment of the entire created order. This is the broad theme of the Hymns on Paradise (esp. Hymns I, III, and XI on the geography and glory of Paradise; trans. Sebastian Brock, St. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, SVS Press, 1990).

Death Before the Fall

Rose’s Position: No Death of Any Kind

One of Rose’s most consequential claims is that there was no death of any kind — human or animal — before the Fall:

  • Death entered the world through sin: “Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin” (Romans 5:12). Rose, following the Fathers, reads this as referring to all death, not only human death.
  • Before the Fall, animals did not die, did not prey upon one another, and did not suffer. The creation was peaceful, harmonious, and life-giving.
  • Rose cites Isaiah 11:6–9 (the wolf lying down with the lamb) and Isaiah 65:25 not merely as eschatological prophecy but as a restoration of the original condition of creation — the peaceable kingdom that existed before the Fall and will be restored in the age to come.

Patristic Basis

  • St. Symeon the New Theologian is Rose’s strongest patristic witness on this point: “All creatures, when they saw that Adam was banished from Paradise, refused to submit to him… But God, who made all things and willed that they all should serve man… restrained all these creatures by His power and in His compassion and goodness did not allow them immediately to attack man, but commanded that the creation remain in submission to him and, having become corruptible, serve corruptible man” (St. Symeon, First Ethical Discourse 1.4; trans. Rose, The First-Created Man; cf. Golitzin, On the Mystical Life, vol. 1, pp. 28–29).

  • St. Theophilus of Antioch (2nd century): Teaches that the wild beasts were not “made evil or venomous from the first — for nothing was made evil by God, but all things good,” but that “the sin in which man was concerned brought evil upon them”; when man returns to his natural condition, “those also shall be restored to their original gentleness” (St. Theophilus, Ad Autolycum II.17; ANF II).

  • St. Gregory of Nyssa: While Gregory’s treatment is more complex (see below on the “garments of skin”), he too speaks of the original creation as free from the corruption and mortality that now characterize it.

Counter-Arguments and Alternative Views

Some Orthodox theologians and scientists note that the fossil record contains evidence of animal death long before the appearance of humans. Rose is aware of this objection but responds by questioning the assumptions underlying the geological interpretation of the fossil record:

  • He argues that the uniformitarian assumption — that geological processes have always operated at the same rate and in the same way — is not a proven fact but a philosophical presupposition that is incompatible with the patristic understanding of creation and the Fall.
  • He suggests that the Flood (Genesis 6–9) may account for much of the geological evidence that is conventionally attributed to millions of years of gradual processes.
  • He also argues that since the pre-Fall world was ontologically different, we cannot simply extrapolate from present-day natural processes to understand the state of the world before the Fall.

Note: This position is contested within Orthodoxy. Many Orthodox scientists and theologians accept the standard geological timeline while affirming the theological reality of the Fall. The question of how to relate the patristic cosmological vision to modern geological evidence remains unresolved.

The “Garments of Skin” (Genesis 3:21)

The Biblical Text

Genesis 3:21: “The Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin, and clothed them.”

The Patristic Interpretation

Rose presents the patristic interpretation of the “garments of skin” as one of the most important keys to understanding the cosmic transformation brought about by the Fall:

  • Several Fathers interpret the “garments of skin” not as literal animal skins (though some Fathers do take this simpler reading) but as the coarsened, mortal, corruptible body that humanity received after the Fall.
  • Before the Fall, human bodies existed in a more refined, spiritual, grace-filled state — not subject to disease, decay, or death. After the Fall, the body became dense, opaque, mortal, and subject to the passions in a way it was not before.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Gregory of Nyssa is the most important patristic source for this interpretation:

  • Gregory teaches that the “garments of skin” (Gen. 3:21) represent the qualities that man shares with irrational animals after the Fall: mortality and the whole train of bodily corruption. The locus is not On the Making of Man (whose chapters 16–17 treat the image of God and the division into male and female, not the garments) but On the Soul and the Resurrection, where Gregory writes: “I take the ‘coats of skins’ to mean that conformation belonging to a brute nature with which we were clothed when we became familiar with passionate indulgence” — the “accretions” he lists being “sexual intercourse, conception, parturition, impurities, suckling, feeding, evacuation, gradual growth to full size, prime of life, old age, disease, and death” (St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection; NPNF II/5).
  • Gregory makes a parallel point in The Great Catechism 8, where mortality is “that capacity of dying which had been the special attribute of the brute creation,” a provisional “coat… something external put on us… for a time, but not indigenous to [the body’s] nature” (NPNF II/5).
  • Gregory does not mean that the body itself is evil — it was created good. Rather, the mode of bodily existence changed: from incorrupt and luminous to corrupt and mortal.

St. Maximus the Confessor

Maximus develops Gregory’s insight further:

  • Maximus teaches that the Fall introduced a distorted tropos (mode of existence) into human nature, while the logos (rational principle) of human nature remained good — innovation occurs “in relation to the mode… not [the] natural principle” (Ambiguum 42 [PG 91:1341D]). The “garments of skin” are read, in this framework, as the mortal, passionate, corruptible way of existing that resulted from Adam’s turning away from God.
  • The mechanism Maximus actually develops is in Quaestiones ad Thalassium 61: Adam diverted the natural capacity for pleasure toward the senses, pain was affixed as its counterweight, and the “law of sin” and death thereby propagated through the passible mode of birth; Christ reverses it through a sinless birth and an undeserved death (trans. Blowers & Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, PPS 25). The explicit identification of this passible mode with the “garments of skin” is a synthesis of Maximus’s thought rather than a lemma he expounds under that phrase.

Other Patristic Witnesses

  • Blessed Theodoret of Cyrrhus: Often cited for the “garments = mortal bodies” reading, but in fact Theodoret reports that interpretation as the view of others (the allegorizers) and declines it: he names both the “mortal flesh” reading and a “bark of trees” reading and says, “I adopt neither of these views,” preferring simply to admire God’s goodness in clothing the naked (Theodoret, Questions on the Octateuch, Question 39 on Genesis; trans. Hill, The Questions on the Octateuch, vol. 1, CUA Press, 2007).
  • St. Methodius of Olympus: Understands the garments of skin as the condition of mortality — “by the coats of skins is signified death” — God clothing fallen Adam in mortality “that… all that was evil in him might die in the dissolution of the body.” Methodius nonetheless argues against Origen’s view that the body itself is the garment acquired after the Fall: “the body is not, then, a fetter upon evil… nor was the soul clothed in it for the first time after the fall” (St. Methodius, On the Resurrection, Part III; ANF VI).
  • St. John Chrysostom: Takes a more straightforward reading, understanding the garments as actual animal skins provided by God, though he stresses the profound condescension (synkatabasis) of God in providing for the needs of fallen humanity (Homilies on Genesis 18, on Gen. 3:20–22; trans. Hill, FOTC 82). Rose acknowledges Chrysostom’s simpler reading while noting the broader patristic tradition represented by Gregory of Nyssa.

Rose’s Synthesis

Rose presents the “garments of skin” interpretation as evidence for his broader thesis about the ontological transformation of the world through the Fall:

  • If human bodies themselves were transformed from an incorrupt state to a corrupt one, then the entire material world — which is intimately connected to humanity, its priest and head — underwent a parallel transformation.
  • The “garments of skin” thus represent not only the change in the human body but the change in the entire cosmos: from incorruption to corruption, from life to death, from harmony to struggle.

The Curse on the Ground

The Biblical Text

Genesis 3:17–19: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground.”

Rose’s Reading

Rose understands the curse on the ground as describing a real cosmic change, not merely a change in Adam’s subjective experience:

  • The earth itself was altered: it now produces thorns and thistles, requires painful toil for cultivation, and participates in the general corruption that entered the world through sin.
  • The Fathers he cites — particularly St. John Chrysostom and St. Symeon the New Theologian — teach that the ground was cursed because of man’s sin, meaning that the corruption of humanity’s head brought corruption to the whole created order that was entrusted to him.
  • Rose connects this to the broader patristic theme of man as the microcosm and mediator of creation: because man stands at the intersection of the spiritual and material worlds, his fall affects both realms (Rose, Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, Part II).

Rose’s Argument Against Uniformitarianism

The Uniformitarian Principle

Uniformitarianism — the geological principle that “the present is the key to the past” — holds that the natural processes operating today (erosion, sedimentation, tectonic movement, etc.) have operated in essentially the same way throughout earth’s history. This principle undergirds modern geology’s long timescales.

Rose’s Critique

Rose argues that uniformitarianism is a philosophical assumption, not a demonstrated fact, and that it is incompatible with the patristic understanding of creation:

  • If the pre-Fall world was ontologically different from the post-Fall world, then the natural processes we observe today cannot be straightforwardly projected backward into the creation period.
  • The creation itself was a unique divine act, not a natural process. The “laws of nature” that govern the post-Fall world were established or modified at the Fall, not operative from the beginning.
  • Similarly, the Flood represents a further catastrophic disruption of the natural order, which may account for geological features (stratification, fossils, etc.) that uniformitarian geology attributes to gradual processes over vast periods.

Rose does not develop a detailed alternative geological theory. His argument is primarily theological: the patristic worldview presupposes that the creation period and the Fall were unique, unrepeatable events that fundamentally altered the character of the physical world, and therefore the uniformitarian assumption is theologically unwarranted.

Note on Scientific Engagement

Rose’s critique of uniformitarianism overlaps in some respects with Protestant “flood geology” and young-earth creationism, though Rose’s framework and motivation are patristic rather than fundamentalist. Some Orthodox commentators have noted this overlap with concern, while others see Rose as simply applying patristic principles consistently. The question of how Orthodox theology should engage with the geological sciences remains an area of active discussion.

The Flood as Further Corruption

Rose treats the Flood (Genesis 6–9) as a real historical event with further cosmic consequences:

  • The Flood represents God’s judgment on the extreme wickedness of the antediluvian world.
  • The post-Flood world is presented by the Fathers as yet further diminished from the pre-Fall and even pre-Flood state: human lifespans decrease dramatically, the earth’s fertility diminishes, and the relationship between humans and animals becomes one of fear and conflict (Gen. 9:2).
  • Rose connects the Flood to the patristic theme of progressive cosmic corruption: Creation –> Fall –> further degradation –> Flood –> further degradation –> the present fallen world.

The Fathers Rose cites on the Flood include:

  • St. John Chrysostom: Treats the Flood as a real event with profound moral and spiritual significance. The Noah/Flood narrative (Gen. 6–9) runs across Homilies on Genesis 22–29 (Hill’s numbering of the 67-homily series, FOTC 82): Hom. 22 on the “sons of God” and giants, through Hom. 29 on Noah’s vineyard.
  • St. Ephrem the Syrian: Provides a detailed commentary on the Flood narrative in his Commentary on Genesis.

Implications for Understanding Natural Evil and Suffering

Rose’s cosmology has direct implications for the problem of natural evil (earthquakes, disease, predation, natural disasters):

  • In the patristic framework as Rose presents it, natural evil is not part of God’s original creation but is a consequence of human sin. God did not create a world of suffering; the world became a place of suffering because of the Fall.
  • This means that natural evil has a moral and spiritual origin: it is the cosmic manifestation of humanity’s alienation from God.
  • The resolution of natural evil is not merely technological (overcoming nature through science) but soteriological: the entire creation will be healed and restored through Christ’s redemption and the final resurrection. “The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay” (Romans 8:21).
  • Rose’s cosmology thus connects directly to the Orthodox understanding of salvation as cosmic redemption — not merely the salvation of individual souls but the restoration of the entire created order.

See Also

References

  • Basil the Great. Hexaemeron. c. 370. Trans. NPNF II/8.
  • Chrysostom, John. Homilies on Genesis (67-homily series). Late 4th century. Trans. Robert C. Hill, Homilies on Genesis, FOTC 74 (Hom. 1–17), 82 (Hom. 18–45), 87 (Hom. 46–67). Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1986–92.
  • Ephrem the Syrian. Commentary on Genesis. 4th century.
  • Ephrem the Syrian. Hymns on Paradise. 4th century. Trans. Sebastian Brock, St. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1990.
  • Gregory of Nyssa. On the Making of Man (De Hominis Opificio). c. 379. Trans. NPNF II/5.
  • Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection (De Anima et Resurrectione). c. 380. Trans. NPNF II/5.
  • Gregory of Nyssa. The Great Catechism (Oratio Catechetica Magna). c. 385. Trans. NPNF II/5.
  • Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua (Ambiguum 42 [PG 91:1341D]); Quaestiones ad Thalassium 61. 7th century. Ad Thalassium 61 trans. Blowers & Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, PPS 25. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2003.
  • Methodius of Olympus. On the Resurrection (De Resurrectione). Early 4th century (Methodius d. c. 311, martyr). Trans. ANF VI.
  • Rose, Seraphim. Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision. Ed. Hieromonk Damascene. 1st ed. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000 (2nd expanded ed., St. Herman Press, 2011).
  • Symeon the New Theologian. First Ethical Discourse (Eth. Disc. 1), in the Theological and Ethical Discourses (Ἠθικά). 11th century. Trans. Seraphim Rose, The First-Created Man: Seven Homilies of St. Symeon the New Theologian (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood); and Alexander Golitzin, On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses, vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1995. Critical text: Darrouzès, Traités théologiques et éthiques, SC 122 (1966).
  • Theodoret of Cyrrhus. Questions on the Octateuch (Quaestiones in Octateuchum), Question 39 on Genesis. 5th century. Trans. Hill, The Questions on the Octateuch, vol. 1. Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2007.
  • Theophilus of Antioch. Ad Autolycum (To Autolycus). 2nd century. Trans. ANF II.