https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=-Za-uSism7E
So imagine now Adam and Eve are in the garden. At first Adam is not even separated into two, he’s one. And this is actually an important thing that we see in the Church Fathers, the tradition in the Church Fathers, which is that even the separation of Adam into two people, to make this androgynous being into two, was already looking forward to the fall. So the separation into male and female, then finally Adam and Eve are seduced by the serpent and they have to leave the garden. And leaving the garden is this going down into the world. When they were in the garden they were naked. And we need to understand this nakedness in the context of this image of the mountain. Keep this image of the one and the many. You know, just keep that image in your mind. They’re going to keep coming back to it all the time. In the garden they were naked. They didn’t need anything from the outside. They had everything they needed within that communion with God. They didn’t need to add something from the outside, to build something from the outside. They just had, all they needed was the communion. And as soon as they fall, then this nakedness, the Church Fathers talk about how this nakedness was actually they were clothed in glory. It wasn’t that it was naked the way we think of it, but it was rather that they didn’t need external thing. They were emanating, you know, they were emanating light. You can imagine it that way. They were emanating glory. They didn’t need to cover themselves. As soon as they fall, then they have to, they become ashamed. They look up, you know, they understand that God is there and all of a sudden they feel like they have to hide themselves from God. So what do they do? They take leaves, they try to cover themselves. That is the very first human act, act in the sense of the first human making. The first things the human made was clothing. First human art. Let’s talk about it that way so you’ll see where I’m going right away. The first human art is clothing. And what’s its purpose? It’s to cover, it’s to protect, it’s to hide. Okay? And so you can also understand it as you’re moving down from the mountain. So imagine now again the Sun above, above the world, the Sun is shining down, right? And at some point the Sun becomes a threat to you. Just like for them, God actually became to them in their perception, God became a threat to them. And so they wanted to cover themselves. They wanted some shade from this, from something that was above them. And that is what art is. And that is why art in the Old Testament is actually pretty negative. It has a very negative connotation. And I’m going to show you, I’m going to bring you through it, but you’re going to see that actually human activity, human making is actually a very negative aspect. And it’s not just even in the Bible, but even let’s say in Hellenistic culture, it was the same idea. They had this notion that true knowledge was episteme, true knowledge was the knowledge of the principles, right? The knowledge of the higher things. And and techne or craft or art, it was, you know, it’s like applied knowledge. And there’s something about that that’s almost like degrading of knowledge down into the world, you know. Think of Plato and his idea of the shadows of the pure forms and then the shadows in the world. And so it’s not just, we don’t only see it in the Bible, we see it in other cultures as well, where this idea that the higher things, when you make, when you cover yourself, you’re hiding yourself from the higher things. It becomes a veil, it becomes a separation. Right, so now using the word veil is probably a very good word for you to understand what it’s referring to. The veil’s in the temple, the veil’s in the tabernacle, it was all about that. It was all about hiding, you know, protecting ourselves from the glory of God, but also protecting the glory of God from being desecrated from the outside. Okay, so that’s the clothing. And then as they fall, God gives them garments of skin. And the garments of skin are the best image to understand this clothing, to understand this addition to our nature, this adding that we put on top, because the garments of skin are made of dead animals. They’re made of death. It’s using death to protect us from death. Taking something dead, making it as a covering, so that you protect yourself from death outside. So why did they wear the garments of skin? What were they protecting themselves from? In the scripture, from the thorns, God says you go down the mountain, you come down, and then you encounter the hostility of the world. You know, being naked up in a garden in the glory of God is all fine, but being naked out in the woods is not fine, because you get, you step on thorns, you know, and that’s why they wear these garments. St. Gregory of Nice is amazing, because he says that Moses’s sandals are the garments of skin. It’s a perfect image, because these skin sandals on the bottom of your feet to protect yourself from the thorns and the spikes and the hostility of the ground is a very beautiful image to help you understand, to understand this. Now, what’s important is that we need to understand this covering. Now, not just as clothing, you know, clothing is the image. It really ends up being everything that humans do in the world of the fall, basically. Our whole state of death, our whole state of living death, you could say, you know, of fighting death, of being in a world of death, of constantly having to deal with the reality of the hostility of the outside. So, if you want to read more about this idea of the garments of skin, there’s a wonderful classic Orthodox book called Deification in Christ by Paniotis Nellis. I’m going to quote something from his where he talks about St. John Chrysostom, and Nellis says, St. John Chrysostom teaches that before the fall, man had no need either for cities or for arts and skills or for the covering of clothing. These were then superfluous, he continues, but afterwards they became necessary because of our infirmity. And not only these things, but everything else, the whole throng of remaining necessities. And death entered with all these, dragging all of them in along with itself. So, there’s a play between death and these protections from death. There’s a game happening between the two, right? As you go further out into the world, you need to build stronger and stronger things. And the classic example is, let’s say I’m from Montreal. When my ancestors, maybe a very long time ago, lived in warmer climates, didn’t need much. But now, if I go outside without a winter coat and a hat and boots, I’m gonna die. So, to live further out in the world of death, we need more and more covering, more and more civilization, more and more structures, an army, weapons, a wall around the city, etc. etc. We need buildings to protect ourselves from the elements, to protect ourselves from attacks, to protect ourselves from the people spying on us or whatever it is that we do, that’s why we need buildings. And now, in the story of scripture, and medicine is the same, by the way. And medicine is exactly the same structure. It’s a human activity which uses death to put death away. Because all medicine is poison. All the medicine, it’s all poison. It’s all something that can kill you. We use something that can kill you in order to stop something that’s killing you. So, we play this game and we have to be careful. It’s a fine line between, you know, you have cancer, you go take chemotherapy, and the chemotherapy is killing you, but you’re trying to heal your cancer. So, it’s like this line that you’re always playing. You take a vaccine, you get injected with a disease in order to fight off a disease. This is the process of the garments of skin.