To Florus 6.30

I certainly will not attack those who think Adam, had he obeyed, could have been transferred to immortality as a reward. We read that Enoch and Elijah were taken away so as not to see death (Genesis 5:24; Hebrews 11:5; 2 Kings 2:11). But nature’s arrangements are one thing, rewards for obedience another. One person’s merit is not so great as to overturn everything established naturally. Inborn mortality would therefore have continued operating in the rest, even if that first human had passed from prolonged life to eternity.

This rests not on a conjecture open to denial but on a certain example: Enoch’s children could not be freed from the condition of dying by their father’s immortality. Nor should anyone perhaps object that, if not sinners, at least all the righteous would have reached immortality without intervening bodily dissolution. Abel, first among the righteous, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and every company of saints in both Testaments displayed their merit through virtues and their nature through death.

Christ’s authority also confirmed this settled matter. The Sadducees put a question to him using a woman married seven times, asking which husband would chiefly claim her if bodily resurrection were believed. He answered: ‘You are mistaken, knowing neither the Scriptures nor God’s power. In the resurrection they neither marry nor take wives, for they will not die’ (Matthew 22:29–30; Luke 20:35–36). Knowing his own work, he explained why he had instituted marriage: reproduction would make up death’s losses. Generous fertility would cease at once when grasping death ceased.

If, then, Christ who created it testifies that fertility was made to contend with frailty, and marriage’s condition was arranged before sin, mortality too plainly belongs not to transgression but to nature, to which we read marriage also belongs. The law promulgated—‘On the day you eat what is forbidden, you shall surely die’ (Genesis 2:17)—therefore means penal death, not bodily death. It threatens sins, not reproductive seed; only transgression incurs it, and only reform escapes it.

Its being said to fall on the day of sin follows Scripture’s practice of calling condemned someone still to be condemned. Thus the Lord says in the Gospel: ‘Everyone who has not believed in me is already judged, because he has not believed in the name of God’s only-begotten Son’ (John 3:18). This does not mean that unbelief denying Christ was already joined to eternal punishment before the time of judgment, since everyone who comes to faith was formerly an unbeliever. Rather, to display the lawgiver’s judgment, sins are spoken of as already punishments. Finally, both the book called Wisdom and many people’s opinion affirm that Adam himself was cleansed through subsequent reform (Wisdom 10:1–2).