To Florus 1.107

Your explanation of the apostle Paul's words would deserve to be passed over with a laugh if it did not frighten those unfamiliar with Scripture. The apostle says: “When you were slaves of sin, you were free from righteousness” (Romans 6:20). He certainly could not have said “freed”. The language of liberation is fittingly and properly used when a person is freed from harmful things. Those who resolve to owe nothing to the virtues, however, can be called free from virtues. A person can therefore be called free either from good or from evil when, serving one, he aims to owe nothing to the other. But a person can be called freed only from evil, because the word “liberation” contains a sign of the distress that is driven away. What difficulty, then, could be raised here about the apostle's words when, following ordinary human usage, he called them free from good and freed from evil?

He says: “When you were slaves of sin, you were free from righteousness. What fruit did you then have in those things of which you are now ashamed?” (Romans 6:20–21). But lest you suppose that we become slaves of sin through nature, hear the apostle himself speaking in the same passage: “Do you not know that when you present yourselves as slaves to obey someone, you are slaves of the one you obey, whether of sin or of obedience to righteousness?” (Romans 6:16). He says that you presented yourselves as slaves to sin, so that you would understand him to impute sin to will, not birth. He therefore called them free from righteousness solely because they had refused to keep its commands.