To Florus 6.27

Enough about the woman; let us pass to the man’s tasks. ‘To Adam he said: The earth is cursed in your works. In sorrow you shall eat from it all the days of your life. It shall produce thorns and thistles for you, and you shall eat the grass of your field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread until you return to the earth from which you were taken, because you are earth, and into earth you shall go’ (Genesis 3:17–19). Here he did not say, ‘I will multiply your thorns or your sweat’; they are spoken of as though first created then. Yet this objection is removed with no greater effort than in his wife’s case.

First, it is not the human’s seed but the soil that is cursed: ‘The earth will be cursed in your works.’ What had the fields done to deserve the insult of a curse for the sin of someone else’s will, when they certainly could inherit nothing from Adam? Was it to teach by the very sods that a curse can exist where no fault exists? If sin was in the human but the curse in the crop, plainly guilt does not always attach to loss.

If the earth is cursed to afflict the sinner, while iniquity is not located where the curse is, why could the same condition not apply even if some miseries were shown to have been imposed on our nature after the first human’s sin? It would not follow that newborns are miserable to prove them guilty. Rather, by recalling the first sin, suffering handed down could warn against evil imitation those whom it had not made guilty. The earth likewise would be shown to have endured the insult of a curse to condemn the evil of another’s will, not to generate participation in its own guilt. Unless perhaps we believe soil dearer to God than innocence, so that while he does not allow another’s crime to pollute a clod, he nevertheless permits it to condemn infancy!

The curse is directed at the earth, then, but even this is not left unexplained. The purpose of the pronouncement and the way the soil is called cursed are set out: ‘In sorrow you shall eat from it all the days of your life.’ Notice how he explains himself. The earth is called cursed not because punishment could be inflicted on it, but because this name expresses the opinion of a grieving mind. Knowing it barren because of its cultivator’s deserts, the hungry worker in his distress would blame the soil for what he had himself deserved. Afflicted, he would call it cursed. Its fertility was withheld precisely so that the transgressor should acknowledge neither nature nor earth, but his own will and person, as subject to the curse.

‘It shall produce thorns and thistles for you.’ He was not content to say, ‘It shall produce thorns and thistles,’ but added ‘for you.’ Long before, at the command, the earth had produced thorny bushes among its other plants. Now, to sting the human being, it was promised to be thornier than usual. This could chastise Adam severely: after paradise’s springs and meadows, even one bramble could offend him.

But ‘In the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread’ does not seem to me especially connected with misery. Sweat is even a natural aid, refreshing the limbs of workers. The text itself testifies that cultivation’s labor lay upon him before sin: ‘The Lord God took the human he had made and placed him in paradise to work and guard it’ (Genesis 2:15). Even in paradise, then, God did not want him to receive food with absolutely no labor, but by requiring work stirred the industry he had implanted. What new thing do we believe happened if someone who experienced labor also felt sweat?

It continues: ‘Until you return to the earth from which you were taken, because you are earth, and into earth you shall go.’ This last part of the pronouncement, like the woman’s, concerns information, not punishment. Indeed, as the matter shows, it comforts the human by promising an end. Above, it had recalled pains, labors, and sweat, whose sensation nature received and whose excess the person received. Lest these seem to extend forever, the announced limit softens the distress—as though to say: You will not always suffer these things, but only until you return to the earth from which you were taken, because you are earth and into earth you shall go.

After saying, ‘Until you return to the earth from which you were taken,’ why did he not add, ‘Because you sinned and transgressed my commands’? That should have been said if bodily dissolution belonged to crimes. What did he say instead? ‘Because you are earth, and into earth you shall go.’ He showed the reason for returning to earth: ‘Because you are earth.’ The earlier words explained how he was earth: ‘Because you were taken from earth.’ If God said the reason for returning to earth was having been taken from earth, and that taking could not concern iniquity, then beyond doubt bodily dissolution in one who was not eternal belonged to mortal nature, not iniquity.

That barrenness of trees, abundance of thorns, and increased distress of painful childbirth were therefore imposed on particular people, not the race. When Cain and Abel were born, both shared one nature but had different wills. Cain, sinning voluntarily, gained nothing from the fact that his father’s sins did not burden him; Abel suffered no harm from his parents’ wrongdoing. Each, by personal judgment, through a different purpose and outcome, publicly showed that neither virtue nor vice carried a natural determination within him.

Performing priests’ work, they offered sacrifices to God their creator. Unequal care distinguished their outwardly equal service. God’s pronouncement made this clear, showing Abel’s gift pleased him. To the offended Cain he explained his displeasure: Cain had offered rightly but divided wrongly. Immediately the impious mind blazed with envy and, burdened by his brother’s holiness, gratified envy with a brother’s murder. Thus at the first occasion it became clear that death is not evil, since a righteous person was the first of all to undergo it.

Yet the guilty mind’s audacity did not escape God’s anger. Cain was questioned about his brother, convicted of his crime, and sentenced to punishment. Besides the terror laid upon him as the mark of his cruelty, he was punished by a curse from the earth: ‘You are cursed from the earth, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the earth, it shall no longer give you its strength’ (Genesis 4:3–12). See, once again the earth’s barrenness is decreed as the cultivator’s punishment. Countless kinds of torments are also threatened in Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 28:15–68).

What then? Did the thickets in our fields, which the farmer labors to cut back with his billhook, sprout through Cain’s murder? Since you think every owner of thorny land liable for the sin punished by abundant thorns, will all infants now be said not only to have eaten fruit, though born toothless, but also to have shed Abel’s blood? The madness reached by Manichaean inherited sin is clear. Since it contains nothing but insanity, catholics’ sober judgment laughs at your arguments; yet those same people’s affection weeps over your ruin.