ld not be immediately realised in consequence of the entrance of sin.
It is perhaps Irenaeus' highest merit, from a historical and
ecclesiastical point of view, to have worked out this thought in
pregnant fashion and with the simplest means, i.e., without the
apparatus of the Gnostics, but rather by the aid of simple and
essentially Biblical ideas. Moreover, a few decades later, he and
Melito, an author unfortunately so little known to us, were already
credited with this merit. For the author of the so-called "Little
Labyrinth" (Euseb., H. E. V. 28. 5) can indeed boast with regard to the
works of Justin, Miltiades, Tatian, Clement, etc., that they declared
Christ to be God, but then continues: [Greek: Ta Eirenaiou te kai
Melitonos kai ton loipon tis agnoei biblia, theon kai anthropon
katangellonta ton Christon] ("Who is ignorant of the books of Irenaeus,
Melito, and the rest, which proclaim Christ to be God and man"). The
progress in theological views is very precisely and appropriately
expressed in these words. The Apologists also professed their belief in
the full revelation of God upon earth, that is, in revelation as the
teaching which necessarily leads to immortality;[492] but Irenaeus is the
first to whom Jesus Christ, God and man, is the centre of history and
faith.[493] Following the method of Valentinus, he succeeded in
sketching a history of salvation, the gradual realising of the [Greek:
oikonomia Theou] culminating in the deification of believing humanity,
but here he always managed to keep his language essentially within the
limits of the Biblical. The various acting aeons of the Gnostics became
to him different stages in the saving work of the one Creator and his
Logos. His system seemed to have absorbed the rationalism of the
Apologists and the intelligible simplicity of their moral theology, just
as much as it did the Gnostic dualism with its particoloured mythology.
Revelation had become history, the history of salvation; and dogmatics
had in a certain fashion become a way of looking at history, the
knowledge of God's ways of salvation that lead historically to an
appointed goal.[494]

But, as this realistic, quasi-historical view of the subject was by no
means completely worked out by Irenaeus himself, since the theory of
human freedom did not admit of its logical development, and since the
New Testament also pointed in other directions, it did not yet become
the predominating one even in the third cen