The Garments of Skin and the Ancestral Wound

The creature who is to be deified is found in a wounded condition. The Eastern reading of the fall — ancestral sin, inherited mortality and corruption rather than inherited guilt — determines what deification has to accomplish and why it can begin at all. This file sets out that reading, then the patristic motif of the “garments of skin” as at once the consequence of sin and a merciful provision, and shows why a fallen creature is nonetheless a deifiable one.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What the East Says the Fall Did

The Orthodox doctrine of the fall is set out at Ancestral Sin vs. Original Sin, and the essentials must be restated here because deification is unintelligible without them.

What the Church confesses is inherited: mortality, corruptibility (phthora), and a darkened and disordered condition in which the passions dominate and the nous is turned away from God. What she does not confess is inherited guilt. The descendants of Adam are not held culpable for Adam’s transgression; they inherit its consequences, and they sin because they are mortal and corrupted, not because they are already condemned for another’s act (see Theological Anthropology, on the consequences of the fall, and the treatment of Romans 5:12 at Ancestral Sin vs. Original Sin, which turns on the Greek eph’ ho against the Latin in quo).

The consequence for deification is direct. If the fall had annihilated the image, deification would require a new creation, and the human being who is deified would not be the human being who fell. Because the image is defaced and not destroyed, and the nature wounded and not replaced, deification is the healing and completion of this creature. The Eastern account of salvation is therapeutic before it is juridical: what is required is a physician, and what is administered is life (see Soteriology).

This is also why the Orthodox tradition speaks of the fall in terms of a missed vocation rather than only of a broken law. Adam was set on a road and did not walk it. St. Irenaeus’ account of the human being created immature and intended to grow makes the fall the interruption of a journey — which is why the remedy is the resumption of the journey rather than the discharge of a debt (Against Heresies IV.38; trans. ANF 1; see St. Irenaeus of Lyons: Infancy and Growth).

The Garments of Skin

“Also for Adam and his wife the LORD God made tunics of skin, and clothed them.”
— Genesis 3:21

The Greek Fathers, above all St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Maximus the Confessor, read the “garments of skin” (chitonas dermatinous) not as literal animal hides but as the new mode of existence given to human beings after the fall: mortality and everything that follows from it — biological life as we now know it, appetite, reproduction, labour, and by extension the whole apparatus of law, property, and politics by which mortal creatures organize survival (see Panayiotis Nellas: The Motif in Nyssa and Maximus).

Panayiotis Nellas made this motif the centre of his anthropology, and his decisive contribution is the insistence on its two-fold character (Nellas, Deification in Christ, trans. Russell, SVS Press, 1987, 60–63; expounded at Panayiotis Nellas: Consequence and Provision):

(a) The garments are a consequence of sin. They are not part of human nature as created. To describe present human existence — mortal, appetitive, competitive — as simply “human nature” is to mistake the wound for the body.

(b) The garments are a gift. God clothed them. 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, 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 the fallen order is sanctified and all critique of it becomes impossible. Drop (b) and Christianity becomes a religion of flight in which the body, the family, and the city are simply enemies.

The rule that governs their use follows from the pair: 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).

Two qualifications belong here in honesty. First, this reading is a theologoumenon — a patristic interpretation elaborated by a modern theologian, not a conciliar definition. 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 (see Panayiotis Nellas: Consequence and Provision, which flags the same point). Second, the modern elaboration is not to be read back into Nyssa and Maximus as though they had written Nellas’ chapter.

Transformation, Not Abolition

The corollary that matters most for deification is that the garments are to be transformed, not simply stripped off.

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 — which is what the Paschal proclamation that Christ trampled down death by death means (see Christology; Panayiotis Nellas: Consequence and Provision).

From which follows the shape of the deifying life. 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 the human being exists, and thereby its transfiguration. Asceticism, on this account, is not contempt for the body or for the world. The monk who fasts and lives celibate does not despise marriage or food; he lives already, imperfectly, in the mode of the resurrection, anticipating a condition in which the provision will no longer be needed (see Orthodox Monasticism; Asceticism, Prayer, and the Church).

This is the answer to a suspicion that attaches to deification perennially — that a doctrine so exalted must be world-denying. It is not. It is a doctrine about what the world and the body are for.

Why a Wounded Creature Can Be Deified

Four things make deification possible for a fallen creature, and they should be stated together because each is insufficient alone.

The image survives. Defaced, obscured, but not abolished. There is something to heal (see Image, Likeness, and the Archetype).

The freedom survives. Fallen freedom is weakened, hesitant, and enslaved to passion, but it is not annihilated; the gnomic vacillation Maximus describes is a wounded mode of a real capacity, and synergy therefore remains possible (see St. Maximus the Confessor: Natural and Gnomic Will). This is the point at which the Orthodox doctrine parts company with any total-depravity anthropology; and it is also why the Church rejects Pelagianism, since the surviving freedom cannot heal itself and is healed only by grace (see Synergy and the Mysteries).

The nature is assumed. Christ took the fallen condition — mortality, hunger, weariness, the capacity to suffer — and so healed it from within. “That which He has not assumed He has not healed” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101; trans. NPNF II/7). [Disputed: whether Christ assumed human nature in its fallen or its unfallen state is a genuine question in Orthodox theology, on which patristic and modern authors differ in emphasis; the shared confession is that he assumed everything human except sin, and that his sinlessness is not a reservation about the completeness of his humanity. See Christology.]

The remedy is administered. The healing is not a general amnesty but a communicated life, given through the Mysteries and appropriated in the ascetic struggle (see The Way).

The Ancestral Wound and the Shape of the Christian Life

Two practical consequences follow, and they are the reason this file belongs in a compendium on deification rather than only in one on the fall.

Repentance is the normal mode of the deifying life, not its preliminary. If the human condition is a wound rather than a verdict, then healing is a process, and metanoia — the continual turning of the mind — is what a creature under treatment does. This is why the Orthodox ascetic literature is so heavily preoccupied with self-accusation and compunction, and why any spirituality that treats repentance as a stage to be graduated from is regarded with suspicion (see The Philokalia; The Jesus Prayer).

Death is the last enemy and the last garment. The deified are not exempt from dying. What changes is what dying is: for those in Christ, the garment is passed through rather than removed, and the resurrection of the body — not the survival of a soul — is the term of deification (see Orthodox Eschatology; Eschatology).

The doctrine of theosis is therefore not a flattering account of human capacity. It is an account of what God does with a creature who is dying, and of what that creature must consent to.

References

Gregory of Nazianzus. Epistle 101 (to Cledonius). Trans. NPNF II/7.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies, IV.38. Trans. ANF 1.
Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua; Questions to Thalassius. Trans. Nicholas Constas, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 2014 (Ambigua); Maximos Constas, On Difficulties; Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2003.
Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. Norman Russell. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1987. Esp. 60–63, 93–108.
Romanides, John S. The Ancestral Sin. Trans. George S. Gabriel. Ridgewood, NJ: Zephyr, 2002.
Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
The Holy Bible, cited in the New King James rendering.