To Florus 5.31

You thought it a powerful objection to ask where an evil will arose in the first man himself, or in the devil who had been created an angel. Yet you say it arose in God’s work—that is, in an angel or a human being—not because he was God’s work, but because he was made from nothing. Take care, then, that by different paths you too do not say the necessity of evil was eternal. If the cause of evil’s arising in God’s work was that the work had admittedly been made from nothing, then before what exists was made, this nothing always was. That is, before what exists was made, nothing had ever existed; what never existed is said to have been nothing. From eternity, therefore, what did not exist before being made by God—whose substance alone has no beginning—never existed. This emptiness, then, this nothing, always was before the existence of things brought it to an end. This nothing was not made; creatures were made, and the nothing ceased to be.

In a creature made from nothing, however, you invent the claim that evil arose precisely because it was made from nothing. You have therefore attributed the evil arising in a human being to his origin; and you say that origin—nothing—was sin’s cause. For you say: ‘Evil arose in a human being not because he had been made by God, but because he had been made from nothing.’ If evil therefore arose because the condition of the preceding nothing required it, and that nothing was eternal, you have fallen by altered paths and now hang entirely in your teacher’s snare: both of you confess evil to be from eternity. But here too he is more intelligent. Introducing natural sin, he said an eternal substance of darkness existed which compelled this evil to be present without the sinner’s will. He therefore gave an author to the thing he made necessary, so that the evil invading substances would appear to have something forcing it. You, however, with the unbearable leadenness of your mind, affirm the necessity of evil but deny an author of that necessity. As with infants, so with the very first doer of sin, you leave the deed in place, and say that some great mystery can be understood: that this nothing had immense power, although it was nothing.