oly Scriptures, he could not altogether avoid reflecting on
the problems: why there is a second deity alongside of God, and how the
two are related to one another. His incidental answers are not
essentially different from those of the Apologists and Tertullian; the
only distinction is this incidental character. Irenaeus too looked on the
Son as "the hand of God," the mediator of creation; he also seems in one
passage to distinguish Father and Son as the naturally invisible and
visible elements of God; he too views the Father as the one who
dominates all, the head of Christ, i.e., he who bears the creation and
_his_ Logos.[554] Irenaeus had no opportunity of writing against the
Monarchians, and unfortunately we possess no apologetic writings of his.
It cannot therefore he determined how he would have written, if he had
had less occasion to avoid the danger of being himself led into Gnostic
speculations about aeons. It has been correctly remarked that with
Irenaeus the Godhead and the divine personality of Christ merely exist
beside each other. He did not want to weigh the different problems,
because, influenced as he was by the lingering effects of an
early-Christian, anti-theological interest, he regarded the results of
this reflection as dangerous; but, as a matter of fact, he did not
really correct the premises of the problems by rejecting the
conclusions. We may evidently assume (with Zahn) that, according to
Irenaeus, "God placed himself in the relationship of Father to Son, in
order to create after his image and in his likeness the man who was to
become his Son;"[555] but we ought not to ask if Irenaeus understood the
incarnation as a definite purpose necessarily involved in the Sonship,
as this question falls outside the sphere of Patristic thinking. No
doubt the incarnation constantly formed the preeminent interest of
Irenaeus, and owing to this interest he was able to put aside or throw a
veil over the mythological speculations of the Apologists regarding the
Logos, and to proceed at once to the soteriological question.[556]

Nothing is more instructive than an examination of Irenaeus' views with
regard to the _destination of man_, the _original state_, the _fall_,
and _sin_; because the heterogeneous elements of his "theology," the
apologetic and moralistic the realistic, and the Biblical (Pauline), are
specially apparent here, and the inconsistencies into which he was led
are very plain. But these very contradi