To Florus 1.67

But let us proceed to the rest. Writing about me, after the words of yours I quoted above, you add the following: “After this he quoted our statement: ‘For this shameful desire, which shameless people shamelessly praise, would not exist unless the human being had first sinned. Marriage, however, would exist even if no one had sinned, for children would be begotten without this disease.’ He quoted my words up to this point. He feared what I added: ‘This was possible in the body belonging to that life, although it cannot now take place without this disease in the body belonging to this death.’ Here too, rather than finish my statement, he chopped it off, so to speak, because he feared the apostle's testimony: ‘Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from the body of this death? God's grace through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Romans 7:24–25). For the body of this death did not exist in paradise before sin. That is why we said that in the body belonging to that life, the life that existed there, children could have been begotten without this disease, whereas in the body of this death they cannot be begotten without it” (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.6).

You certainly keep to your habit, and quite consistently in this particular work: since you argue against the truth, you say nothing true. Yet scarcely enough corrections can be supplied for the countless blunders of your learning. I will therefore note briefly here that you deceive. You will understand, at least after this work, that I am unaccustomed to lying. Claim the whole possession of that vice for yourself, then, so that you may hear from the Gospel, not unjustly, that you are a liar from the beginning, like your father (John 8:44): either the one under whose dominion you say you belonged at birth, or your second, lesser father, who initiated you into those refined mysteries that cannot be named among decent people. I quoted all this in my previous work, though you pretend I omitted it. If you read near the end of my first book, you yourself will be able to acknowledge with what truth and clarity of argument it was refuted. Your statement was therefore destroyed by a strong reply in its entirety, not after being cut short.

Now listen briefly. When the apostle said, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from the body of this death? God's grace through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 7:24–25), he was not referring to the mortality of our body, which animal flesh received through the ordering of nature, but to the habit of wrongdoing. Whoever, after Christ's incarnation, turns to the pursuit of virtue through the New Testament is freed from its guilt. There he speaks in the person of Jews who, through craving for enticements, continued to stray even after the sacred Law's prohibition. He shows that their only help in that crisis was to believe in Christ, who prescribed precautions for the future while granting forgiveness for past acts. Christ did not press the guilty by confronting them with punishment; he cherished those who ran to him in the most generous embrace. He did not crush those weighed down by terror but restored through kindness those who had amended their lives.

The speaker had already experienced this kindness himself: “This is a human saying: Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the first. But I received mercy for this reason: that in me Christ Jesus might show all his patience, as an example for those who would believe in him for eternal life” (1 Timothy 1:15–16). To make you understand that this concerns a bad life, not human nature, and to prevent you from thinking that the reason for Christ's coming meant he also declared infants sinners, Paul says: “In me he showed all his patience.” God's patience is what he speaks of to the Romans: “Do you not know that God's kindness leads you to repentance? But according to your hardness and unrepentant heart you store up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath” (Romans 2:4–5). God's patience is therefore exercised when he waits a considerable time for a person's conversion. But patience cannot be displayed toward infants. If there were sins of nature which the Savior attributed to them, he would falsely be called patient but most certainly be called cruel. Yet God cannot be anything but kind and just, as is my God Jesus Christ. Paul, long a persecutor, and the others in whose person he speaks experienced his patience: they were waited for a long time, even though they were freed late. The apostle therefore condemns human lives, not human nature.

In commending this grace to the Jews, since the Law punishes the wicked and does not possess the effective mercy of baptism, in which the sins of deeds are cleansed through a brief confession, he shows that they must run to Christ and implore the help of this pardon. They must recognize that the Law threatens the wounds of conduct, while grace heals them effectively and quickly. By “body of death” he therefore meant sins, not flesh. Had he been speaking of the misery of our bodily members, which you think resulted from sin, he would more rightly have called it the death of the body rather than the body of death. To see that Scripture commonly calls sins “members”, read what this same apostle says to the Colossians: “Put to death your members that are on earth: fornication, impurity, and greed, which is the service of idols. Because of these things God's wrath comes upon the sons of unbelief. In these things you too once walked, when you lived in them” (Colossians 3:5–7). See how he calls “members” the things he identifies as sins. And in the letter to the Romans itself he speaks of the body of sin: “Our old self was crucified with him, so that the body of sin might be destroyed, so that we might no longer serve sin” (Romans 6:6).

In the same manner here he exclaimed, in the person of the Jews, as we said: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:24). That is: “Who will free me from the guilt of the sins I committed when I could have avoided them, which the Law's severity does not forgive but punishes? Who can rescue me from these members, that is, from the vices I collected by imitating wicked people, until I built up a complete body of sin? Who, I ask?” And he answered, as though prompted by the voice of the facts themselves: “God's grace through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 7:25). It is God's grace that credits the faithful with righteousness without works, as David says: “Blessed are those whose injustices are forgiven and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man to whom the Lord has not imputed sin” (Psalm 32:1–2; LXX Psalm 31:1–2; compare Romans 4:6–8). He who makes a human being blessed is himself blessed, through eternal justice. By that justice he forgives only a sin that he could rightly have imputed. But he could not rightly have imputed it if the person to whom it is imputed could not also have avoided it. No one, however, can avoid what belongs to nature. Therefore absolutely no one can have sin from nature's necessity. Let this brief account suffice.