To Florus 6.10

Now let us prove what we said: your doctrine differs in no respect from the Manichaeans’. There is no doubt at all that Adam’s own nature was made utterly evil if it was formed with this condition: a necessity of evil but no necessity of good. A crime, even if conceived by will, would become natural in a nature in which goodness would not become natural. Such a person is falsely said to have sinned voluntarily, since he labored under the prior disadvantage of a thoroughly evil condition. How bound to evil he was is obvious, if he was destined to be filled with inseparable guilt.

What worse substance could I find than one made so that it could fall into injustice but could not leave injustice? If it had suffered this compulsion on goodness’s side, even losing free will, it would still have brought no accusation against its author: no one would challenge him over an abundance of kindness. But when such domination is placed on evil’s side, it accuses no one more than humanity’s maker himself. Flattery from his own accusers—that is, from you—uselessly strokes a god proved the closest friend of wickedness by the ugliness of what he created.

Who can be persuaded that he did not destine the first human for crimes if he deprived him of the capacity for reform; if he gave him so twisted a mind that his own error could not displease him, leaving no return to honor and no improvement through experience; if, to prevent him ever feeling a desire to recover uprightness, he tore out the very possibility of correction? If his condition was such that a single fall cost him the power to reform for as long as he lived, he was plainly established for no other purpose than to fall. Indeed, it is more accurate to say he always lay fallen than that he fell, if he is not allowed to rise in respect of conduct.

What sort of freedom, then, was supposedly bestowed on him at first, if among two contrary qualities he received the worse as necessary and the better as changeable—indeed, if, occupied by the tyranny of guilt, he was stripped of the capacity to come to his senses? The first human’s condition was therefore utterly repulsive from the outset, if God established it so unhappily that his coming fall into crime bound him to perpetual necessity of sinning.