The death of a man is unique, and yet it is universal.
The straight line would symbolize its uniqueness, the circle its universality.
But how can one figure symbolize both?

Christianity declares that in the life and death of Jesus Christ the unique and the universal concur.
Perhaps no church father saw this concurrence of the unique and the universal as clearly, or formulated it as precisely, as Irenaeus.
To be the Savior and the Lord, Jesus Christ has to be a historical individual with a biography all his own;
he dare not be a cosmic aeon that swoops to earth for a while but never identifies itself with man's history.
Yet this utterly individual historical person must also contain within himself the common history of mankind.
His history is his alone, yet each man must recognize his own history in it.
His death is his alone, yet each man can see his own death in the crucifixion of Jesus.
Each man can identify himself with the history and the death of Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ has identified himself with human history and human death, coming as the head of a new humanity.
Not a circle, then, nor a straight line, but a spiral represents the shape of death as Irenaeus sees it;
for a spiral has motion as well as recurrence.
As represented by a spiral, history may, in some sense, be said to repeat itself;
yet each historical event remains unique.
Christ is both unique and universal.

The first turn of the spiral is the primeval history of humanity in Adam.
As Origen interprets the end of history on the basis of its beginning, so Irenaeus portrays the story of Adam on the basis of the story of Christ.
"Whence, then, comes the substance of the first man?
From God's Will and Wisdom, and from virgin earth.
For 'God had not rained', says the Scripture, before man was made, and there was no man to till the earth.
From this earth, then, while it was still virgin God took dust and fashioned the man, the beginning of humanity".
Irenaeus does not regard Adam and Eve merely as private individuals, but as universal human beings, who were and are all of humanity.
Adam and Eve were perfect, not in the sense that they possessed perfection, but in the sense that they were capable of development toward perfection.
They were, in fact, children.
Irenaeus does not claim pre-existence for the human soul;
therefore there is no need for him, as there is for Origen, to identify existence itself with the fall.
Existence is created and willed by God and is not the consequence of a pre-existent rebellion or of a cosmic descent from eternity into history.
Historical existence is a created good.

The biblical symbol for this affirmation is expressed in the words: "So God created man in his own image;
in the similitude of God he created him".
There are some passages in the writings of Irenaeus where the image of God and the similitude are sharply distinguished, so most notably in the statement: "If the (Holy) Spirit is absent from the soul, such a man is indeed of an animal nature;
and, being left carnal, he will be an imperfect being, possessing the image (of God) in his formation, but not receiving the similitude (of God) through the Spirit".
Thus the image of God is that which makes a man a man and not an oyster;
the similitude of God, by contrast, is that which makes a man a child of God and not merely a rational creature.
Recent research on Irenaeus, however, makes it evident that he does not consistently maintain this distinction.
He does not mean to say that Adam lost the similitude of God and his immortality through the fall;
for he was created not exactly immortal, nor yet exactly mortal, but capable of immortality as well as of mortality.

Therefore Irenaeus describes man's creation as follows:

"So that the man should not have thoughts of grandeur, and become lifted up, as if he had no lord, because of the dominion that had been given to him, and the freedom, fall into sin against God his Creator, overstepping his bounds, and take up an attitude of self-conceited arrogance towards God, a law was given him by God, that he might know that he had for lord the lord of all.
And He laid down for him certain conditions: so that, if he kept the command of God, then he would always remain as he was, that is, immortal;
but if he did not, he would become mortal, melting into earth, whence his frame had been taken".
These conditions man did not keep, and thus he became mortal;
yet he did not stop being human as a result.
There is no justification for systematizing the random statements of Irenaeus about the image of God beyond this, nor for reading into his imprecise usage the later theological distinction between the image of God (humanity) and the similitude of God (immortality).

Man was created with the capacity for immortality, but the devil's promise of immortality in exchange for disobedience cost Adam his immortality.
He was, in the words of Irenaeus, "beguiled by another under the pretext of immortality".
The true way to immortality lay through obedience, but man did not believe this.

"Eve was disobedient;
for she did not obey when as yet she was a virgin.
And even as she, having indeed a husband, Adam, but being nevertheless as yet a virgin, having become disobedient, was made the cause of death, both to herself and to the entire human race;
so also did Mary, having a man betrothed (to her), and being nevertheless a virgin, by yielding obedience, become the cause of salvation, both to herself and the whole human race".
Because he interprets the primitive state of man as one of mere potentiality or capacity and believes that Adam and Eve were created as children, Irenaeus often seems inclined to extenuate their disobedience as being "due, no doubt, to carelessness, but still wicked".
His interpretation of the beginning on the basis of the end prompts him to draw these parallels between the Virgin Eve and the Virgin Mary.
That parallelism affects his picture of man's disobedience too;
for as it was Christ, the Word of God, who came to rescue man, so it was disobedience to the word of God in the beginning that brought death into the world, and all our woe.

With this act of disobedience, and not with the inception of his individual existence, man began the downward circuit on the spiral of history, descending from the created capacity for immortality to an inescapable mortality.
At the nadir of that circuit is death.
"Along with the fruit they did also fall under the power of death, because they did eat in disobedience;
and disobedience to God entails death.
Wherefore, as they became forfeit to death, from that (moment) they were handed over to it".
This leads Irenaeus to the somewhat startling notion that Adam and Eve died on the same day that they disobeyed, namely, on a Friday, as a parallel to the death of Christ on Good Friday;
he sees a parallel also to the Jewish day of preparation for the Sabbath.
In any case, though they had been promised immortality if they ate of the tree, they obtained mortality instead.
The wages of sin is death.
Man's life, originally shaped for immortality and for communion with God, must now be conformed to the shape of death.

Nevertheless, even at the nadir of the circuit the spiral of history belongs to God, and he still rules.
Even death, therefore, has a providential as well as a punitive function.

"Wherefore also He (God) drove him (man) out of Paradise, and removed him far from the tree of life, not because He envied him the tree of life, as some venture to assert, but because He pitied him, (and did not desire) that he should continue a sinner for ever, nor that the sin which surrounded him should be immortal, and evil interminable and irremediable.
But He set a bound to his (state of) sin, by interposing death, and thus causing sin to cease, putting an end to it by the dissolution of the flesh, which should take place in the earth, so that man, ceasing at length to live in sin, and dying to it, might live to God".
This idea, which occurs in both Tatian and Cyprian, fits especially well into the scheme of Irenaeus' theology;
for it prepares the way for the passage from life through death to life that is achieved in Christ.
As man can live only by dying, so it was only by his dying that Christ could bring many to life.

It is probably fair to say that the idea of death is more profound in Irenaeus than the idea of sin is.
This applies to his picture of Adam.
It is borne out also by the absence of any developed theory about how sin passes from one generation to the next.
It becomes most evident in his description of Christ as the second Adam, who does indeed come to destroy sin, but whose work culminates in the achievement of immortality.
This emphasis upon death rather than sin as man's fundamental problem Irenaeus shares with many early theologians, especially the Greek-speaking ones.
They speak of the work of Christ as the bestowal of incorruptibility, which can mean (though it does not have to mean) deliverance from time and history.

Death reminds man of his sin, but it reminds him also of his transience.
It represents a punishment that he knows he deserves, but it also symbolizes most dramatically that he lives his life within the process of time.
These two aspects of death cannot be successfully separated, but they dare not be confused or identified.
The repeated efforts in Christian history to describe death as altogether the consequence of human sin show that these two aspects of death cannot be separated.
Such efforts almost always find themselves compelled to ask whether Adam was created capable of growing old and then older and then still older, in short, whether Adam's life was intended to be part of the process of time.
If it was, then it must have been God's intention to translate him at a certain point from time to eternity.
One night, so some of these theories run, Adam would have fallen asleep, much as he fell asleep for the creation of Eve;
and thus he would have been carried over into the life eternal.
The embarrassment of these theories over the naturalness of death is an illustration of the thesis that death cannot be only a punishment, for some termination seems necessary in a life that is lived within the natural order of time and change.

On the other hand, Christian faith knows that death is more than the natural termination of temporal existence.
It is the wages of sin, and its sting is the law.
If this aspect of death as punishment is not distinguished from the idea of death as natural termination, the conclusion seems inevitable that temporal existence itself is a form of punishment rather than the state into which man is put by the will of the Creator.
This seems to have been the conclusion to which Origen was forced.
If death receives more than its share of attention from the theologian and if sin receives less than its share, the gift of the life eternal through Christ begins to look like the divinely appointed means of rescue from temporal, i.e., created, existence.
Such an interpretation of death radically alters the Christian view of creation;
for it teaches salvation from, not salvation in, time and history.
Because Christianity teaches not only salvation in history, but salvation by the history of Christ, such an interpretation of death would require a drastic revision of the Christian understanding of the work of Christ.