To Florus 4.5

After criticizing this with such solemnity, he proceeds to the rest and tells his patron to attend to what follows. “God, then,” he says, “the creator of male and female, formed organs suited to reproduction.” But after inserting only this much from the beginning of my statement, he omits a very large number of lines. These chiefly stress that souls are newly created and owe nothing either to flesh or to seed. He then adds my words: “Thus he ordained that bodies should be generated from bodies. Yet his active power intervenes in their production, governing everything that exists by the same power with which he created it. If, then, offspring come only through sex, sex only through a body, and a body only through God, who could doubt that fertility is rightly attributed to God?” (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.4.12). After quoting this from my work, he commends it, saying that he too acknowledges these statements to be catholic. Who would not then think that the man had changed? But he does not forget himself. He supposes that a perverse doctrine and his sense of shame are in a similar condition: that the doctrine can recover even from its evident destruction, just as his shamelessness grows harder through constant wear. So he approves my statement and, by voluntarily embracing it, drives the blade of an adverse judgment into his own belief. Yet afterward, as though his strength were unimpaired, he imagines that he still has something with which to fight.

He continues as follows: “After these things, which have been said truthfully and catholically—or rather, which are truthfully written in the divine books, but have not been said catholically by this man, because they were not said with the intention of a catholic heart—the Pelagian and Caelestian heresy now begins to be introduced, which is why he said them. For notice what follows.” Here he adds my words again: “What, then, does the devil recognize as his own in the sexes, by which he can rightly possess their offspring? Their difference? But that exists in the bodies God made. Their union? But it is defended by the privilege of God’s blessing no less than by his institution. For it is God’s voice that says, ‘A man will leave father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two will be one flesh’ (Genesis 2:24). It is God’s voice that says, ‘Increase and multiply, and fill the earth’ (Genesis 1:28). Or perhaps fertility itself? But that is the very reason marriage was instituted” (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.4.13).

To this he replied that the devil recognizes neither the difference of the sexes, nor their union, nor their fertility as something of his own by which he can rightly possess their offspring. But after acquitting all these things he found something to assign to the devil. He attacked my decency as fear, saying that amid so many functions of bodies and sexes I had been afraid to name the desire of the flesh. This, then, is what he tells his patron against me: “But amid all these things he was unwilling to name the desire of the flesh, which is not from the Father but from the world (1 John 2:16). The devil is called the ruler of this world. He did not find this desire in the Lord, because the Lord came among human beings as a man without it. Hence the Lord himself says, ‘See, the ruler of this world is coming, and he will find nothing in me’ (John 14:30): nothing, that is, of sin, either inherited at birth or added in the course of life. Among all the natural goods he mentioned, this man was unwilling to name the desire that makes even marriage ashamed, although marriage glories in all those goods. For why is that act of married people withdrawn and hidden even from their children’s eyes, except that their praiseworthy union cannot take place without shameful lust? It was this that made the first people blush when they covered their private parts (Genesis 3:7). Those parts had not previously been shameful, but deserved praise and glory as God’s works” (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.4.13).

Most blessed father Florus, in the four books of my first work I pleaded the case for marriage, for sexual union, for bodies, for the sexes, for God’s work, and finally for God’s reputation. Just as his reputation is necessarily praised by the goodness of his works, so it is wounded when they are defamed. Throughout that entire work, truth that cannot be obscured proved that the devil had added nothing either to the body’s formation or to its sensation. Thus it was thoroughly demonstrated that the belief in inherited sin had been drawn from Manichaeus’s mud.