his nature.

A somewhat paradoxical result of the defence of the Logos doctrine in
the struggle against the "Patripassians" was the increased emphasis that
now began to be laid on the integrity and independence of the human
nature in Christ. If the only essential result of the struggle with
Gnosticism was to assert the substantial reality of Christ's body, it
was Tertullian who distinguished what Christ did as man from what he did
as God in order to prove that he was not a _tertium quid_. The
discriminating intellect which was forced to receive a doctrine as a
problem could not proceed otherwise. But, even before the struggle with
Modalism, elements were present which repressed the naive confidence of
the utterances about the God-man. If I judge rightly, there were two
features in Irenaeus both of which resulted in a splitting up of the
conception of the perfect unity of Christ's person. The first was the
intellectual contemplation of the perfect humanity of Jesus, the second
was found in certain Old and New Testament texts and the tradition
connected with these.[603] With regard to the first we may point out
that Irenaeus indeed regarded the union of the human and divine as
possible only because man, fashioned from the beginning by and after the
pattern of the Logos, was an image of the latter and destined for union
with God. Jesus Christ is the realisation of our possession of God's
image;[604] but this thought, if no further developed, may be still
united with the Logos doctrine in such a way that it does not interfere
with it, but serves to confirm it. The case becomes different when it is
not only shown that the Logos was always at work in the human race, but
that humanity was gradually more and more accustomed by him (in the
patriarchs and prophets) to communion with God,[605] till at last the
perfect man appeared in Christ. For in this view it might appear as if
the really essential element in Jesus Christ were not the Logos, who has
become the new Adam, but the new Adam, who possesses the Logos. That
Irenaeus, in explaining the life of Jesus as that of Adam according to
the recapitulation theory, here and there expresses himself as if he
were speaking of the perfect man, is undeniable: If the acts of Christ
are really to be what they seem, the man concerned in them must be
placed in the foreground. But how little Irenaeus thought of simply
identifying the Logos with the perfect man is shown by the passage in
III