Worsening generations

Meaning

Worse offspring, greater depravity and increasing excess join a moral decline narrative to a historical theory of inherited corruption. They are the author's evaluative and medical claims, not modern genetics.

II.3.8 offers two related sources: corrupted parental seed and impure nourishment. It describes corruption worsening across generations and compares the process with inherited diseases such as leprosy. Yet medicines are said capable of arresting the active corruption, so the claim is not immutable biological fate. The prowling Satan image and the sequence of increasingly vicious ages connect bodily danger with theological and moral interpretation. They should not be turned into a diagnosis of a contemporary family or a claim that illness establishes moral guilt.

Notes 140 and 141 identify the biblical prowling-adversary and Horatian decline resonances as explanatory parallels. The French predicates of worsening remain the historical text, while those identifications belong to modern commentary.