To Florus 2.24

There I replied: ‘With due respect to your teaching authority, you are evading the issue. But understand that the truth has taken away your freedom to wander. Look: we too agree that sin is the work of an evil will, or the devil’s work. But through what is this sin found in an infant? Through the will? Yet there has been no will in the infant. Through the body’s form? But God gave that. Through the soul’s arrival? But the soul, newly created by God, owes nothing to bodily seed. Through marriage? But marriage belongs to the parents’ activity, and you previously said that they did not sin in this act. If that concession was insincere, as your subsequent argument indicates, marriage itself must be cursed for causing the evil. Yet marriage has no substance of its own: its name designates people’s activity. The parents, then, whose union caused sin, rightly deserve condemnation. There can therefore no longer be any doubt that married people are consigned to eternal punishment, since their activity enabled the devil to gain dominion over human beings. If you concede this, you lose everything you previously seemed to maintain: namely, your statement that a human being is God’s work. For the offspring’s origin lies in the union of bodies. Therefore, if evil comes into human beings through their origin, and the devil’s right over human beings comes through evil, it necessarily follows that the devil is the maker of human beings, since the origin of those born comes from him’ (quoted in Augustine, Marriage and Desire 2.44–49). After this I repeated his words: ‘For just as sin, whether derived from this source or that, is the devil’s work, so a human being, whether born from this source or that, is God’s work.’ At once I challenged him as follows: ‘When I think of that frightened statement of yours that marriage is not evil, I cannot consider these other remarks without laughing. If you believe that human beings are made by God and that married people are innocent, see how impossible it is to maintain that original sin is derived from them. Certainly the one born does not sin, the one who fathered the child does not sin, and the one who created the child does not sin. Through what cracks, amid so many defenses of innocence, do you imagine sin has entered?’