To Florus 6.14

So far I have argued as the practice of our faith required. But I will not be content with this approach alone. I shall deal generously with you and deliberately take on a role that seems to favor your teacher’s position. The purpose is to force you to attack Mani, if you disagree with him. The absence of trickery in our argument will be shown by the very fact that the advocate of inherited sin can find no way to oppose Mani. Thus the extent of your conspiracy and the mutual advantages by which you manage everything will appear when no quarrel can be stirred up between you. Let the reader keep in mind the purpose I have explained for taking this course. Now let us speak in the role we assume.

[Julian argues in an assumed Manichaean voice:] ‘Those who think this bodily formation capable of justice are completely mistaken. The lowly nature of flesh and blood opposes every good pursuit. Every stimulus, through the seduction of the senses, slides into disturbing—indeed overthrowing—the mind. Cast into this mire by some unknown misfortune, the mind loses its noble flashes of light through mixture with clay. Of itself it strives toward its own place, toward the heights, but it is crushed in an earthly prison. When it wishes to fly upward to chastity, it encounters the glue and birdlime of obscene pleasure rising from burning inward parts.

‘If it desires generous liberality, it is bound in the tightest shackles of greed, disguised as thrift. If it wishes to stand in a balanced serenity of steadfastness, it is immediately overwhelmed by a hailstorm of fear and tempests of pain. Turning bloodless before every uncertainty, it cannot remain master of its own judgment. Add the night of ignorance, whose filth surrounds it. What praiseworthy quality shall we suppose in a living being that has neither keen eyes to choose useful things nor the ability to count its shipwrecks among the storms of desires and dangers?

‘Let no one falsely claim these things happened to a substance voluntarily corrupted. The original making of the first humans is found subject to these miseries. To prove this even from Moses, whom catholics revere: the first humans experienced fear’s torture, terrified by the threat of danger unless they obeyed. So far as comparison allows us to judge, we think them more fearful than their descendants, since a punishment as yet experienced by no one tormented them. Why should the threat of death shake people who did not know what harm death would bring? Mere suspicions of evils plainly troubled them. In what tranquility could a mind stand when such a bitter winter of fear disturbed it?

‘And how profound its ignorance, how harsh the condition of enduring it, when it could be freed only by transgression! It would obtain knowledge of good and evil only through an act of condemnable daring. This living being, already so blind and miserable, was made restless too by inborn desire, provoked by the beauty and sweetness of the forbidden thing. As though all this were too little to express its unhappiness, it was exposed to attack by a higher nature. Who, then, could be foolish enough to suppose any good existed where he acknowledges so many instruments of misery were established?

‘This flesh, then, of the worst condition and worst nature, displayed in those first humans what it had possessed from the beginning. The good God could not have made so evil a substance. What remains except to acknowledge one giver of the soul and another creator of creatures of clay?’

Mani’s battle line, whose role I had adopted, now stands in formation. You understand what we await: whoever opposes him must demonstrate it through a consistent attack. Let your doctrine fight him, then; it will appear whether it can make even a slight movement without destroying itself. He has certainly pronounced not only that everyone born from bodily union is criminal, but that Adam himself brought the necessity of faults from the formation of his inward parts and from the dirt of the clay from which he was made. He says: ‘Flesh’s nature was harmful in the first humans. It shut in, drenched, and extinguished the very spark of mind that glimmered with the pursuit of honor. Catholics are utterly foolish: they resist sinners’ testimony and will not accept even their own evidence. They see themselves not doing the good they want but performing the evil they detest (Romans 7:19), yet think there is no necessity of evil in the flesh.’

Let the advocate of inherited sin meet these highly prejudicial claims, if he can. For now I stand as a spectator and await the outcome of your conflict. What will you answer someone swearing that nature was evil even in the first humans? Undoubtedly you will reply that God, humanity’s maker, could not create evil in what he made. Therefore, since God, who does no evil, made humans, they cannot be proved naturally evil. You have said something, and truly. But consider whether you should have said it within my hearing. I care little how forcefully you shook Mani; meanwhile you have passed entirely into my jurisdiction.

Now that you are captured, I enjoy teasing you. I greet your profession with great applause and remind you to remember it. From the dignity of its author—that is, God, who does no evil—you pronounced that his works must be affirmed good. Do you think, then, that all humans generated by the sexual union God established are made by God or by the devil? If by God, how dare you pronounce them guilty and evil, when you said the decisive proof that Adam could not have been made with an evil nature was that he was created by God, who is perfectly good?

If this is a strong argument for believing the first humans’ substance was not established guilty—precisely that God, whom we acknowledge good, created it—then the same argument remains to destroy inherited sin. It proves that everyone born from marriage cannot be created unjust, because God, whom we acknowledge good, creates them. But if, even after this, raging shamelessness persists in swearing both that infants are made by God and that they are naturally evil, these lies bring no prejudice against a catholic or our God. Yet plainly you have not attacked Mani. He gladly embraces your accusation against God, content that you have lost the argument through which you tried to establish Adam’s good condition.