For God not only made us out of nothing, but through the grace of the Word He also granted us a life in accordance with God. But human beings turned away from eternal things and, following the devil’s counsel, turned toward corruptible things. They therefore became the cause of their own corruption in death. As I said before, they were corruptible by nature. Yet through the grace of their participation in the Word, they could have escaped what belonged to their nature if they had remained good.
For the Word was with them, and because of this even their natural corruption did not approach them, as Wisdom says: “God created man for incorruption and as an image of His own eternity; but by envy of the devil death entered into the world.” When this happened, people began to die, and corruption grew strong against them, gaining greater power over the whole human race than it had by nature, because God’s threat against them for transgressing the commandment was now also in force.
Even in their offenses, people did not stop at any fixed limit. Little by little, they went beyond all measure. At first they invented wickedness and brought death and corruption upon themselves. Later they turned to injustice and went beyond every form of lawlessness. They did not stop at any one evil, but kept devising one new evil after another, becoming insatiable in sin.
Adultery and theft were everywhere, and the whole earth was filled with murder and plunder. When it came to corruption and injustice, no one paid any attention to the law; every kind of evil was committed by everyone, both individually and together. Cities went to war against cities, nations rose against nations, and the whole world was divided by factions and battles, each person striving to outdo the others in lawlessness.
Practices contrary to nature were found among them as well. As the Apostle, a witness of Christ, says: “Their women exchanged natural relations for those contrary to nature. Likewise the men, leaving natural relations with women, burned with desire for one another, men with men committing shameless acts and receiving in themselves the due return for their error.”