To Florus 3.161

By overthrowing his first definition, the wedge of reason brought his rooftops crashing to the ground. What hope have you, then, whose three claims stand on ground as slippery as his one? First you say sin is natural. Second, that God is good although he creates, shapes, and extends evils—that is, sins. Third, that an act of will has been mixed into reproductive seed. Each of these three heads of your definitions totters in itself. Totters, I say? Rather, like ropes made of sand, they fall apart before coming together.

One claim—natural sin—already lies destroyed in the direct defeat of Mani. The other two, peculiar to your opinion, fell in the same familiar destruction that struck him. If he could not establish that humans are born guilty through either an evil nature or the prince of darkness, how much more foolish are you, who added an accusation against God to demonstrate newborn children’s crimes! Just as nature cannot be sin—the thunderbolt that shattered Mani’s doctrine—so, conversely, what is sin cannot be natural. An act of will does not pass into the condition of a substance, as you suppose happened. Much more certainly, the good God never creates evil beings. Thus it has become clear that sin cannot exist in a newborn whom God creates.