To Florus 1.64

If you read my work, then, you will stop wondering why I returned to words of yours that I had quoted earlier. I had promised to prove from your writings that, caught between the impiety you had drunk in and the hatred it aroused that you feared, you had said both what catholics and what Manichaeans usually maintain. Here, then, is the sequence of words I placed next to your opening statement, which you now, with a false accuser's effrontery, have lied about my altering: “I know I have made a great promise: to prove from my opponent's words both that those who deny that human beings are God's work are rightly condemned, and that this man himself, who acknowledges them to be God's work, does nothing except establish that whatever comes from the fruitfulness of marriage is the devil's property. In this way the Manichaeans' opinion will be destroyed even by the principles of its own defense. But the whole opening of his book has made this plain. For he says that human beings born from marriage, that is, from males and females, are God's work. By this statement he overturns everything he was about to argue and agrees with us that those who dare to deny it are impious. One part is therefore already settled; it remains for me to show that he builds up what he had just attacked.”

After saying this, I returned to the part of your opening statement where you had said: “We say that those born from such a union inherit original sin, and we do not deny that, whatever parents they are born from, they remain under the devil unless they are reborn in Christ (compare John 3:3–5) and, rescued through his grace from the power of darkness, are transferred into the kingdom of him who did not wish to be born from that same union of the two sexes” (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.1). Why, then, do you think you can be cleared of Manichaean error because you dared to insert a statement with which you were struggling with all the powers of your mind? This does not defend your error; it testifies to your extraordinary foolishness. You imagine, like Calliphon, that your speech can bring virtue and vice, justice and injustice, into an alliance. As for the apostle's words, “Who rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13), read the fourth book of my work, and then you will learn what the Teacher of the Nations meant.