Irenaeus reduces every single question to the simple relationship

'But his battle is not dialectical.',

Ephesians 4:32  (RSV)

 and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons: The First Great Theologian of the Church - Hans Urs von Balthasar

The Balthasar Reader.

Saints in the Church

98 People of the Church (1) Irenaeus.

... page 384.

flesh, in which the redeemability and factual redemption and resurrection of the entire terrestrial world is shown to be possible and actual. Against the separation of Old and New Covenant then, it posits the unity of the Testaments in Christ and their diversity as stages of a divine education of the human race. Against the cold flashing pretensions of gnosis then, it posits the patience of God, visible in Christ and his suffering, bestowed upon us as the grace of redemption in the form of faith, hope, and love by which we know how to preserve a patient and humble distance from the eternal and incomprehensible God. This stance is the great condition of all salva­tion; indeed it is redemption itself. Ever anew Irenaeus reduces every single question to the simple relationship of superior God and humbly bowing creature, of the eternal majesty of the triune, self-con­tained being and the eternal neediness and desire of fragmentary, ceaseless becoming.

But for Christians this relationship has lost the last shadow of the tragic. In Christ-from God's side, then, and not from that of humanity-the abyss is bridged. The person becomes God's vessel; the earth becomes God's dwelling place; bread and wine, the fruits of the earth, seal in their Eucharistic transformation the redemption of the world and the thanks of the creature. With Irenaeus everything is radiantly warm joy, elevated, wise mildness. To be sure, his word of battle is as hard as steel and clear as water. A compromise, a synthesis of the Word of God and myth, does not even arise as a possibility of thought. But his battle is not dialectical. He refutes by unmasking and, still more profoundly, by setting forth the truth. He does not seek to persuade by the use of syllogism; he lets the truth like the sun do its lighting and its warming. He has the patience of maturity, and the two words, "patience" and "maturity," recur again and again in the most decisive passages. He is naive in the noblest sense of the word, just as the Word of God in human form was naive: In this sign he has "overcome the world."

99 . People of the Church [Il]: Origen    

To overestimate Origen and his importance for the history of Christian thought is all but impossible. To place him beside Augustine and Thomas simply accords him his rightful place in this history. Anyone who has taken up patristic research for any length of time will have the same experience as the mountain climber. Slowly and constantly the peaks about him sink lower but even so still seem threatening, and behind them looms up majestically the till now hidden dominant middle of the massif. None of the great fathers, from the Cappado­cians to Augustine, to Dionysius, Maxirnus, Scotus Eriugena, and