Irenaeus on the Fall

I was interested to read a passage in book III (23,6) of Irenaeus' Against All Heresies this evening. Irenaeus in this passage ties in a very attractive reading of the story of Adam and Eve with an interpretation of the meaning of human life and death through history. Death, I understand him to be saying, is God's way of mercifully intervening to save us from ourselves in our naturally transgressive lives: it shows us that he sets a fixed limit to our sufferings and views the bringing of death as a 'good' act on God's part. Evil is shown to have an end; not that life itself is inherently evil, but that human behaviour seems within the context of life inescapably to tend in an 'evil' direction. This, for Irenaeus, is what the Garden of Eden shows us. Deliverance from evil, of course, is the last petition in the Lord's prayer. The final conquest of evil is what we all await. This happens throughout our lives and is God's ongoing project. It will one day be complete, but for now the fact that all human lives have a finite span - so that suffering cannot ever truly win the day - attests in some degree to the reality of God's saving and nourishing activity.

Here's the passage:

'God acted out of compassion [when driving Adam and Eve out of paradise] so that human beings might not remain transgressors forever, that the sin with which they found themselves burdened might not be immortal, that the evil should not be without end and therefore without remedy. God therefore halted them in their transgression by interposing death...by setting them a term through the dissolution of flesh which would take place in the earth, in order that human beings, by 'dying to sin' (Rom. 6:2), should begin one day to 'live to God''.