Annotatio LIV

”And God made for Adam tunics of skin.” — Genesis 3:21

Francesco Giorgio, in the first Tome of the Problems, contends that this passage must be understood according to bare and naked allegory alone.¹ For thus we read in him, problem 59: “God was not a butcher, that he should kill sheep or lambs: because, since he made the animals two by two, if he killed two or four to make the tunics, then he afterward created others — which is false, since God rested on the seventh day.² But these things are said by allegory, that these tunics may be understood [to have been] made from the skin of that Lamb of whom it is written, ‘The Lamb was slain from the origin of the world’³ — so that by his merits all sins may be covered,” etc. With this same figment of Francesco, the Origenists — the first authors of this opinion — made use, more than a thousand two hundred years ago. Wishing to meet [refute] whom, Theodore, Bishop of Heraclea, and Gennadius, Bishop of Constantinople, said that “tunics of skin” in this place signify the barks of trees.⁴ For just as [the hides] of animals [For just as the hides] of animals are called “skins,” so also the barks of trees are called “skins.” Therefore, from the barks of trees, fit for the composition of garments, the first parents — divine piety prompting — made tunics for themselves, just as before they had made themselves girdles from fig-leaves, to cover the shame of their genitals. But Theodoret, in question 39 on Genesis, disapproving this solution, speaks in this manner: “Of those who pursue allegories, some say the skins are the mortal flesh; but certain others discuss that they were procured from the barks of trees. But I approve neither of these: for the one is too curious, the other indeed very fabulous. For since divine Scripture has said that the body was formed before the soul, how is it not fabulous to say that God gave them mortal flesh after the transgression of the commandment? But to inquire curiously whence God had the skins, and on that account to devise a new kind of clothing from the barks of trees, seems to me superfluous, since the Creator of all did not lack whence to prepare those tunics.”⁵ Procopius of Gaza, in the commentaries on Genesis, dissolving the adduced reasoning, says that those tunics could have been made in two ways without the killing of animals⁶ — that is, either from the conversion of pre-existing matter into skins (for just as [God] converted the waters of the Nile into blood, so he could change the matter of the elements into skins), or from creation out of nothing. For since man, created at the beginning of the sixth day, sinned at the sixth hour of the same day,⁷ and was ejected from paradise, nothing prevents [us from holding] that God, on that same sixth day, created skins out of nothing — since the seventh day had not yet come, on which he rested from all the work of creation which he had accomplished. Read the preceding Annotation.