For God not only made us out of nothing, but through the grace of the Word He also granted us life according to 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.
That is to say, the presence of the Word with them kept even their natural corruption from approaching them, as also 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, men began to die, and corruption grew strong against them, gaining greater power over the whole human race than it had by nature. This was because the divine threat for transgressing the commandment also stood against them.
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 new evils upon new evils, becoming insatiable in sin.
Adulteries and thefts were everywhere, and the whole earth was filled with murders and plunder. There was no concern for law amid corruption and injustice; every kind of evil was committed by everyone, individually and together. Cities were at war with cities, nations rose against nations, and the whole earth was divided by factions and battles, while each competed in lawlessness.
Nor were things contrary to nature absent among them, but as the Apostle, a witness of Christ, says: "Their women changed the natural use into that which is against nature; and the men also, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned with desire for one another, men with men committing shameless acts, and receiving in themselves the due return for their error."