Coats of Skins

In my amateur critique of the Presiding Bishop’s 2005 Christmas Poem, I was taken to task in the Comments about my implication that, after the Fall, Man was clothed with flesh — as opposed to dead animal skins. I love this subject. It is also a subject which will naturally be given short shrift in Blog format. Be that as it may …

Genesis 3:21 — Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make them coats of skins, and clothed them.

St Gregory of Nyssa says this means that they literally put on “coats of skins,” but it also means, figuratively, that they became clothed in a different kind of flesh; that is, their nature was changed. Fr Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation, and Early Man.

As St. Gregory says, “from the nature of dumb animals mortality is transferred to a nature created for immortality.” Only for man is death contrary to nature and mortality is evil. Florovsky on Gregory of Nyssa — taken from the late Bishop Alexander’s resourceful SITE.

In order, then, that man might not be an undying or ever-living evil, as would have been the case if sin were dominant within him, as it had sprung up in an immortal body, and was provided with immortal sustenance, God for this cause pronounced him mortal, and clothed him with mortality. For this is what was meant by the coats of skins, in order that, by the dissolution of the body, sin might be altogether destroyed from the very roots, that there might not be left even the smallest particle of root from which new shoots of sin might again burst forth. St. Methodius, Discourse on the Resurrection.

But when through the Devil’s malice and the woman’s caprice, to which she succumbed as the more tender, and which she brought to bear upon the man, as she was the more apt to persuade, alas for my weakness! (for that of my first father was mine), he forgot the Commandment which had been given to him; he yielded to the baleful fruit; and for his sin he was banished, at once from the Tree of Life, and from Paradise, and from God; and put on the coats of skins … that is, perhaps, the coarser flesh, both mortal and contradictory. This was the first thing that he learnt–his own shame; and he hid himself from God. Yet here too he makes a gain, namely death, and the cutting off of sin, in order that evil may not be immortal. Thus his punishment is changed into a mercy; for it is in mercy, I am persuaded, that God inflicts punishment. St. Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 38, on the Theophany

MAN, then, was thus snared by the assault of the arch-fiend, and broke his Creator’s command, and was stripped of grace and put off his confidence with God, and covered himself with the asperities of a toilsome life (for this is the meaning of the fig-leaves); and was clothed about with death, that is, mortality and the grossness of flesh (for this is what the garment of skins signifies); and was banished from Paradise by God’s just judgment, and condemned to death, and made subject to corruption. St. John Damascene, Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, III, 1