Athanasius of Alexandria

In his own words on Wisdom of Solomon

• Wisdom of Solomon 6:18

  God created human beings and wanted that they remain incorruptible. But people, becoming careless, abandoned the contemplation of God, imagining and inventing evil.… Thus they received the sentence of death, which had been threatened them beforehand. Afterward, they were no longer in the state in which they had been created but were subject to corruption in conformity with their thoughts, and death dominated and reigned over them. In fact, the transgression of the precept returned them to their nature, and given that they came into existence out of nonexistence, it makes sense that in the course of time they would be subject to a corruption that tends to nonexistence. Indeed, if at one time their nature was nonexistence, and they were called into existence thanks to the presence and the goodness of the Word, it follows that human beings, now deprived of the knowledge of God and tending toward nonexistence (evil, in fact, does not exist, whereas good does exist because it was created by God, who is), would also be deprived of external existence. This is what it means to remain in death and corruption after decomposition. Human beings are mortal by nature, because they were made from nothing. But if they had preserved their likeness to him who is, by contemplating him, they would have diminished their natural corruption and become incorruptible, as Wisdom says: "Respect for laws is the guarantee of incorruptibility." Being incorruptible, they would have lived like God, as a passage of the divine Scripture declares: "I said, You are gods and all children of the Most High. But you will die like human beings and fall like one of the princes."

  On the Incarnation of the Word 4