To Florus 1.48

Sin deserves both the abhorrence of honorable people and lawful condemnation from the justice that is the whole subject of our present inquiry. With all the curtains drawn back, bring into the open at last the grounds on which you teach that sin is inherent in nature. Surely nothing we established above, either in praise of divine justice or in defining guilt, was false. Show, then, that these two things can hold together in infants. If there is no sin without will, no will where freedom has not developed, and no freedom where there is no ability to choose through reason, by what monstrosity is sin found in infants, who have no use of reason? They therefore have no capacity for choice and consequently no will; and once these undeniable points are granted, they have no sin whatsoever. Pressed by these massive arguments, let us see where you break out. You say: “Infants are weighed down by no sin of their own, but by another's” (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.22).

The evil of your view is not yet clear. We suspect that you have introduced this point to arouse hostility toward some man whose injustice you wish to portray with your African rhetoric. In whose court, then, did someone else's crime burden unstained innocence? Who was that barbarous enemy, so mindless, so savage, so forgetful of God and fairness, who sentenced these infants as guilty? We certainly praise your talent; your education shows! You could not otherwise have depicted some judge, or rather tyrant, as deserving the hatred of the human race than by swearing that he spared not only no one who had committed no sin, but not even those who could not have sinned. Before a suspicious mind, a good conscience commonly labors in its own defense against the possibility that it did wrong, since it at least could have done wrong. But someone defended by the very impossibility of the act is completely cleared of the charge.

Reveal, then, who this condemner of innocents is. You answer: “God.” You have indeed struck my mind a blow. But since so great a sacrilege scarcely deserves belief, let us hesitate over what you have said. We know that this name can be applied to different beings: “There are many gods and many lords; for us, however, there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things” (1 Corinthians 8:5–6). Which God, then, are you charging with a crime? Here you, most religious priest and most learned rhetorician, breathe out something more dreadful and horrible than the valley of Amsanctus or the pit of Avernus, indeed something more criminal than the worship of idols committed in those places (compare Virgil, Aeneid 7.565).

You say: “God himself, who commends his love toward us (Romans 5:8), who loved us and did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us (Romans 8:32), judges in this way. He himself is the persecutor of newborn children. He hands infants over to eternal fires for an evil will, although he knows they could have had neither a good nor an evil will.” After this statement, so monstrous, so sacrilegious, so deadly, if we had sane judges I ought to answer with nothing but abhorrence of you. With just and commendable seriousness I would judge you unworthy of discussion. You have fled so far from religion, from education, and finally from ordinary human understanding that you consider your Lord a criminal, something scarcely any barbarian would do.