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.