To Florus 4.43

It follows, then, that you must put aside modesty and, while remaining friends with your teacher, enter an alliance with the Cynics. As Cicero reports in On Duties, the arguments of some Stoics also accompany them. They criticize ordinary decency because we regard as disgraceful in speech things that are not shameful in reality, while we call by their proper names things that are shameful in reality. Committing robbery, perpetrating fraud, and committing adultery are shameful acts, but naming them is not obscene. Working to produce children is honorable in reality but obscene in name. “They argue many other things,” he says, “against modesty along these lines. But let us follow nature and avoid everything that offends the approval of eyes and ears” (Cicero, On Duties, book 1).

So you too, who dislike this natural reasoning, the sister of decency, must either say that working to produce children—a task that requires modesty—is uglier and more profane than robbery, sacrilege, and murder of a parent, all of which are supremely shameful in reality but contain no obscenity in their names; or, if you blush to accuse marriage so far that it outweighs even crimes when compared with them, urge married couples to name that union as confidently and freely as we usually name murder of a parent or robbery. If you then add, to mock Christian ears as you usually do, that bodily union intended for offspring is stained by no injustice but can be judged good within its proper measure, embrace the deed of Crates of Thebes. He was a wealthy and noble man so devoted to the Cynic sect that he left his inherited wealth and moved to Athens with his wife Hipparchia, who followed this philosophy with equal commitment. When he wished to have intercourse with her in public, as Cornelius Nepos relates, she drew her cloak over herself to conceal it and was beaten by her husband. “Plainly,” he said—in keeping with your views—“you are still poorly taught, since you do not dare to do in others’ presence what you know you are right to do” (Cornelius Nepos).

Such conduct is entirely due from your flocks: natural acts should be practiced without any barrier of modesty, because they are proved good by having been created by God for multiplying bodies. Return the favor to the four-footed animals, then. Their examples defend your bodily sensation against the devil’s ownership and Manichaeus’s mouth; you too should imitate their freedom in mating as testimony to the goodness of the act. It is fitting that those who have defended your organs should provide instruction for your conduct.

To establish by repetition what we have done: you said lust should be clothed in no modesty if God had made it. Although I treated this fully in the four books of my earlier work, I have also shown here, through the testimony of all the animals that you still admit were created by God, that sexual lust was created by God. Yet I acknowledge that in human beings it should be screened by modesty. It therefore follows from your doctrine that you should bring back before us the elegance of the Cynics after its long exile and perform natural acts before the city’s eyes, because they were made by God. Do you see how blindly you leaped upon my statement, “In order to express faithfully what took place, the prophet came close to endangering modesty” (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.9.22)? Your teacher, whose inventions I quoted in the previous book, criticizes this consistently with his own fables, since he denies that God made any bodies. But you have shamelessly dared to handle it while acknowledging—though out of fear—that God created the bodies whose sensation you attribute to the ruler of darkness. That claim has been crushed with all the power of truth expressed in the evangelist’s faithful words: “Everything was made through God, and without him nothing was made” (John 1:3).