It is we who were the cause of His taking human form, and for our salvation that in His great love
He was both born and manifested in a human body. For God had made man thus (that is, as an embodied spirit),
and had willed that he should remain in incorruption. But men, having turned from the contemplation of God to evil
of their own devising, had come inevitably under the law of death. Instead of remaining in the state in which God
had created them, they were in process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its
dominion. For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature;
and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning,
through corruption, to non-existence again. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being;
inevitably, therefore when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it; for it is God alone Who exists,
evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good. By nature, of course, man is mortal, since he was made from
nothing; but he bears also the Likeness of Him Who is, and if he preserves that Likeness through constant
contemplation, then his nature is deprived of its power and he remains incorrupt.