To Florus 2.178

The argument you thought you could oppose to us, whether in the book I am now answering or in those you wrote to Marcellinus, is this: sin passed on at the time when all human beings, to use your own words, ‘were that one man’ (Augustine, Merits and Forgiveness of Sins 1.11). Truth crushes this without difficulty and exposes it to the ridicule of every discerning person. Such an argument reveals nothing except your impiety: the impiety by which you believe in a transmission of souls, long ago condemned in the irreverence of Tertullian and Mani, just as there is a transmission of bodies. This is so abominable that when we charged you with it in the letter we sent to the East, you tried to repel it by denial in the books you recently sent to Boniface. You say: ‘They say, however, that we confess a transmission of souls. In whose books they have read this I do not know’ (Augustine, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians 3.26), thereby swearing that you say nothing of the kind. But to expose your falsehood by comparing your own words: how do you say that transmission of souls—a truly impious opinion—is not held in your understanding, when you profess that all human beings were that one man? If you do not believe a part of the soul is bound into the seed, with what mouth do you write that all human beings were Adam alone, when a human being certainly cannot exist except as soul and body together?