To Florus — Book 3

3.1Respect for every virtue ought to flourish among the human race. People ought always to resist wrongdoing with a wise mind and win their Creator’s favor by good pursuits. Or at least, since this first and happier level of constant devotion seems both rare and exceedingly difficult, they ought to reject even long-cherished vices and return to the shelter of reform and repentance. Surely reverence for God ought at least to have remained untouched in this respect: we should not have to defend the divine law in so great a struggle. But the frenzy of sinners has reached the point where we must labor strenuously to teach that God is just. So, trusting in the help of the very justice whose cause we plead, let us now fulfill what we promised in the preceding book.

3.2In the first book, clear definitions established that God is just in such a way that, if he could be proved unjust, he would be proved not to be God. Once no doubt remained about this, it also became clear that justice is simply the virtue that never judges unfairly or acts unfairly, but gives each person what belongs to that person, without deception or favoritism—that is, without showing partiality (Romans 2:11).

3.3The character of this virtue would be maintained only if God punished none of those subject to him except for offenses established to have been committed by free will.

3.4He would not command people to do things he knew their nature made them unable to observe; nor would he judge anyone guilty for what belongs to their nature.

3.5Nor would he charge some people with other people’s sins. Accordingly, he would not sentence innocent children to eternal punishment because of their parents’ wrongdoing, when those children had personally done nothing either good or evil by which they could be shown to have imitated their parents’ crimes. Taken together, these considerations establish both that God exists and that he is just. For it was clear that, if he did anything unjust, his divinity would suffer exactly as much damage as his fairness did (Romans 9:11).

3.6And yet—how wretched human error is!—when I consider the very subject of our dispute, I am shaken by overwhelming grief. Could this really have come into doubt? Could this cause have needed defending? Could churches professing belief in Christ, I ask, really have doubted whether God judges justly—that is, reasonably?

3.7But my very reverence for these matters has made me forget too completely the dispute at hand. I marvel that God’s fairness could have been questioned, although it is well established that in the assemblies of the advocates of inherited sin there is no doubt at all about his unfairness.

3.8This is worse by as much as the pursuit of evil is worse than neglect of good, as deliberate irreverence is more destructive than doubt about the truth, and, finally, as daring to accuse God is more wicked than refusing to worship him.

3.9As the prophet David testifies, the fool did indeed say in his heart that there was no God (Psalm 14:1; Psalm 53:1; LXX/Vulgate Psalms 13:1; 52:1). Yet he did not say that God existed but was unjust. The voice of all nature declared in such harmony that justice belongs inseparably to God that someone denying his existence was more readily found than someone denying his fairness. Someone could arise who thought that what he could not see did not exist; no one had yet been found who called unjust what he believed to be divine (Psalm 14:1; Psalm 53:1;).

3.10That fool, then, seemed to have reached the furthest limit of wickedness by denying God. Yet a race of Manichaeans and advocates of inherited sin has been found whose irreverence surpasses his (Psalm 14:1) (Psalm 53:1).

3.11But to return to the point from which we digressed: it had become clear that the one we acknowledge as the true God can do nothing in judgment that conflicts with justice. Consequently, no one can be held guilty for another’s sins, and so the innocence of newborn children cannot possibly be condemned for their parents’ wrongdoing, since it would be unjust for guilt to pass through reproductive seed.

3.12Although this is so obvious that nothing could be more decisive or more true, I had promised to prove this very point by the testimony of divine law: it would be utterly unjust to charge newborn children with their parents’ crimes. God is so opposed to this that he expressly forbade judges in his law to perpetrate anything so disgraceful. I had therefore promised to establish this. But since the second book was occupied with explaining statements of the apostle Paul, it is fitting to fulfill that promise in the opening part of this book.

We read in Deuteronomy, among the commands ordering that people’s life and conduct, that God also gave this entirely explicit command. To show where it stands among the preceding and following provisions, he says: ‘You shall not withhold the wages of a poor and needy worker, whether one of your own people or one of the foreigners living in your towns. You shall pay his wages daily; the sun must not set before you pay them, because he is poor and places his hope in them. Otherwise he may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin. Fathers shall not die for their children, and children shall not die for their fathers. Each person shall die for his own sin’ (Deuteronomy 24:14–16).

3.13‘You shall not distort justice for the foreigner, orphan, or widow. You shall not take a widow’s garment as security, because you were a servant in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God freed you from there. That is why I command you to do this’ (Deuteronomy 24:17–18).

When God established the pattern for judging, he immediately took care to decree that neither parents should be struck down for their children’s crimes nor children for their parents’. He showed, then, that the first principle and starting point of the justice he commanded judges to maintain was this: family ties must not burden the innocent, and the hatred an individual had deserved must not spread to the family itself. In matters of conduct, justice therefore distinguishes those whom kinship joins. It certainly would not do so if will and reproductive seed operated on the same principle, or if an act of choice passed to descendants through reproduction. With this single testimony we have shown, more than sufficiently, that the ancient authority of the enacted law crushes the utterly repulsive corruption of judgment embraced by this new error. This pronouncement bears on the case in a way that leaves no room for doubt.

3.14In establishing the pattern to be followed in trials, God commanded that innocence should not be implicated in the dangers faced by a relative. Just as he separated the father from the punishment of a sinful son, he separated the son from the father’s condemnation. By giving both persons the same outcome, he clearly showed that parents’ sins can no more pass to children than children’s sins pass to parents (Deuteronomy 24:16).

3.15Therefore, anyone who contradicts this pronouncement by saying that sin is transmitted should also say that sin travels back again. If sins descend from parents to children, let them also ascend from children to parents, since the authority of divine law shows that parents’ crimes do not harm their children, just as children’s crimes do not harm their parents (Deuteronomy 24:16).

3.16Anyone determined to oppose this pronouncement, then, should assert that both things happen, when both were equally forbidden. For it is easier to reject God’s law than to correct it. Rejection is irreverent, but correction is still more irreverent and absurd. If you honor one of its two decrees and detest the other, the part you accept will force you, against your will, to obey the part you reject. The dignity of the one you value also defends the one you opposed. It is completely absurd to imagine you honor commands when you dare attack part of them. Thus rejecting the whole law is more consistent than correcting it. Yet only an impious person will attempt to correct it; devout and sensible people accept and praise it in its entirety.

No one should be troubled here by seeing that the old sacrificial rites ceased in the age of the New Testament. Virtues and sacrificial victims are not governed by the same principle: commands are enduring; sacrifices are temporary. Yet when Christ came, whom the ancient sacrifices foreshadowed, what had been established was fulfilled, not condemned. Those observances are not denounced as having been practiced in their proper times; they came to rest when the perfection promised through their service arrived (Matthew 5:17) (Hebrews 10:1).

3.17The commands containing devotion, faith, justice, and holiness, however, not only did not cease; they were increased. This law about maintaining justice in judgments, which we quoted from Deuteronomy, concerns the enduring character of commands, not the temporary age of ceremonies. It did not disappear with circumcision; it continues with justice (Deuteronomy 24:16).

3.18It is therefore settled—if Moses, through whom God speaks, is believed rather than Augustine, through whom Mani speaks—that children are not made guilty by nature for their parents’ sins (Deuteronomy 24:16).

3.19And so parents’ crimes do not pass to their descendants, although those descendants were born from them, just as children’s crimes do not pass to their parents, who certainly could not have been born from their own children. Birth, then, can no more damage someone’s innocence where that birth exists than it can where it does not exist (Deuteronomy 24:16).

3.20The case is settled. Still, I urge the reader to attend to what I now bring forward. Suppose someone openly professed what the advocate of inherited sin tries to establish by argument: suppose he declared war on God’s law, fearlessly despised the pronouncement we quoted, and asserted, by whatever means he could, that both requirements God wished observed were false. Suppose he did all he could to overthrow both sides of the pronouncement under discussion and fully believed that parents are and ought to be condemned for their children’s sins, and children for their parents’. Even a person like that could not establish the transmission of sin, even on his own assumptions. Why? Because even if the law’s pronouncement were proved false—the pronouncement testifying that relatives of this kind cannot be stained by each other’s crimes—it would remain unshaken that sin is not transmitted. The very fact that parental guilt passed to children and children’s guilt returned to parents would establish that birth was not what brought parents’ sins to children, since they also returned from children to parents, where birth could not be the cause.

Let the result of my argument be clear. Divine law has an inviolable authority, which no arguments of impiety can overthrow. Its decree prescribed with the greatest precision and completeness that declaring children guilty for their parents’ sin is a disgraceful opinion and a distortion of judgment, which it commanded us earnestly to avoid. This thunderbolt shattered the structure of inherited sin. Yet the faith we defend is protected by such strong defenses of truth that even the irreverence capable of denying God’s law cannot shake it (Deuteronomy 24:16).

3.21Now, then, let my words address the man with whom we are disputing. Do you submit to God’s law—at least in your profession, for we know what you do in argument—or do you resist it? If you submit, the dispute is over; if you resist, our agreement is over. If you submit, the error of the advocates of inherited sin is extinguished; if you resist, the unbelief of the Manichaeans is exposed. At all events, it stands established that your opinion and God’s law cannot agree.

3.22Unless perhaps you say that God indeed commanded this, but does not do what he commanded—indeed, that he acts contrary to what he ordered others to do.

3.23Although the extent of this irreverence is glaringly obvious as soon as it is mentioned, let us—with the permission of the very God whose fairness we defend—consider its character, even through a brief examination. What forces him to become a violator of his own law: the pressure of circumstances that overwhelm him, or his own weakness? Or, since it is neither, is it simply a desire to do wrong? But even Mani could not say this, and so he invented a story that your god had endured a terrible battle.

3.24If neither calamity nor weakness nor a desire to transgress bears on him, how can he destroy in judging the pattern of justice he commended by commanding? Indeed, he would be raging not against that justice but against reverence for himself. For fairness has such power that it both condemns those who stray and loses none of its force through the authority of those who abandon it. How, finally, could he want us to do what is just and himself do what is unjust? Does he want us to seem more just than he is—or rather, not more just, but ourselves fair and himself unfair?

3.25Or is what he does just—namely, charging some people with other people’s sins—while what he commands us to do is unjust: declaring each person guilty for the offenses of that person’s own will (Deuteronomy 24:16)?

3.26And where would such envy or malice come from in him? It is envy if he deceived his creature by his commands to prevent it from trying, as far as it could, to imitate his virtues. But it is malice—indeed cruelty—if he punishes mortals for unjust acts they committed by obeying his law.

3.27Or perhaps he does not punish them—which is certainly prudent—but even rewards servants who obey his commands, although those commands teach injustice? Then what did his envy achieve, if mortals arrived by doing unjust things at the same destination they would have reached by observing justice? Those he deceived lose nothing of their happiness, while he is deprived both of the consciousness of goodness and justice and of the honor belonging to them. How much more tolerable it would have been to throw off the profession of religion than to steer a course along such steep and deadly paths!

3.28Therefore, since God does not allow even his servants to commit the sort of act you claim he perpetrates himself, it is clear that you have fled from honoring him no less than from human reason. Consequently, we are not deceived, as you say, by Pelagian error; we are guided by God’s law when we maintain that it is unjust to charge children with their parents’ crimes (Deuteronomy 24:16).

3.29This, to our grief, is the monstrous offspring produced in our time by inherited sin, the daughter of the Manichaeans and your mother.

3.30It has therefore become clear that God commanded what we maintain. Although the plain, genuine meaning of the pronouncement itself is accessible to everyone’s understanding and contains no blemish of obscurity, you might still take refuge in accusing us of slow intelligence and say we do not understand the command. So let us use another testimony, this time not a command but an action performed according to the command, to show how the law was understood.

In the fourth Book of Kingdoms, we read about Amaziah, son of Joash, king of Judah: ‘After the kingdom was firmly established in his hands, he killed his servants who had killed his father. But he did not kill their sons, in accordance with the covenant of the Lord’s law, which commands: Fathers shall not die for their children, nor children for their fathers’ (2 Kings 14:5–6). You see how the truthful historical account displays the justice of the king’s judgment. Although he had been devout, he is reported to have faltered in some respects. The authority of God’s law was therefore recalled to confirm his judgment. So that the deed should not carry too little weight because of the person who did it, it is commended as having been performed according to God’s law and covenant.

3.31Two or three witnesses are ordinarily believed even in a case involving someone’s life. How much more should two sacred witnesses be believed when God’s honor is at stake: the law contained in Deuteronomy and the history recording the kings’ deeds! God himself prescribed how he wished judgment to be given; judgments delivered according to his law testify how his command should be understood. Is there still doubt that Scripture’s authority cannot establish the transmission of sin?

Surely the positions over which we fight such lengthy battles—what you defend and what we defend—are contrary. They are so opposed and incompatible that you fight by persecution and we by argument, you by fury and we by reason. Both sides therefore agree that these statements differ and conflict: children are punished for their parents’ sins; children are not punished for their parents’ sins. Guilt is natural; guilt is not natural. God’s law commands that parents’ sins be charged to children; God’s law commands that parents’ sins not be charged to children. It is obvious that these mutually hostile opinions and propositions cannot both be true.

The rules of trained argument also show that when two opinions arise about uncertain matters, both can be false, but both cannot be true. This can indeed occur in differing alternatives said to admit a middle position, but not in opposites that have no middle. These matters are familiar to dialecticians; for readers unfamiliar with this discipline, however, let us explain them with an example (Deuteronomy 17:6) (Deuteronomy 19:15).

3.32Suppose, for example, the question concerns Goliath’s complexion, and one person insists he was black and another that he was white (compare 1 Samuel 17:4–5). These opposing opinions can both be false, but they cannot both be true. It cannot be true that he was black if he was always white, or that he was white if he remained black throughout his life. Thus these two opinions, which cannot both be true, can both be false if his complexion was neither white nor black but tawny—or a moderate blend of the opposites, with whiteness softened but no full blackness introduced. Differing and opposed descriptions can therefore be denied together more readily than affirmed together.

But opposites without a middle, such as good and evil, just and unjust, innocence and guilt, cannot coexist at one time in one and the same subject; so affirming either necessarily denies the other. For example, a command, advice, or assistance cannot be both just and unjust at the same time. Equally, a person cannot at one and the same time be both guilty and innocent, both good and evil.

3.33Now apply these examples to the case. Charging children with their parents’ sins and not charging children with their parents’ sins cannot both be shown equally just. If justice consists in holding the offspring guilty, it must be injustice to declare them not guilty for those same sins. And just as it is good to command justly, it is evil to give an unjust order. Argument may weaken the force of something already obvious, yet it is helpful to confirm an established case by the supporting judgments of divine law. Let us stay with this point: anyone who stands here with a sound mind will not be allowed to wander among the precipices of our present disputes.

You therefore concede, preacher of natural evil, that God’s law commands that children must not be punished for their parents’ sins. You also acknowledge that this people understood the command precisely as we now maintain it should be observed. Consequently King Amaziah, obeying God’s commands, restrained with praiseworthy moderation the anger caused by his father’s murder. He killed his father’s assassins but spared their sons, out of justice, not cowardice. Amaziah is praised; he is said to have done this according to God’s law, and commended for obeying the Lord’s will. Yet the account does not conceal that remnants of false worship stained him, and it shows that he did not imitate the devotion of his ancestor David (2 Kings 14:3–6). Even this man, who fell short of his family’s holiness, maintained in judgment the justice commended by divine law. Such was the power of reverence for unmistakable fairness! Consider, then, what evil your belief embraces: you attribute to God, whom we acknowledge as eternal, good, and just, an injustice that neither a king’s pride nor a bereaved son’s grief committed.

3.34But let us press the point. It has been established that injustice cannot belong to God. It has also been established that he himself commanded that parents’ sins must not harm their children. The dignity of the one giving the command itself declared unjust what he forbids. Yet, to deal more generously with you, I give you the opportunity to answer. Of the two opinions I just placed face to face—parents’ sins should be charged to children, or should not be charged to them—which do you think should be regarded as just?

If you say your own, which you want applied even at the final judgment, I ask in turn whether you regard the remaining opinion, ours, as just or unjust. You will undoubtedly pronounce it unfair. But the law’s authority commands this very position to be maintained. You see, then, that one of three alternatives necessarily remains. Either you admit that God’s law is unjust—indeed, through the law, accuse God himself of injustice—or you resort to your teachers’ language and say that the law given through Moses was not commanded by your god. Or, if you dare say neither, you must admit that inherited sin is asserted against the law’s teaching and commands. Surely we cannot believe you capable of such madness as saying that God maintains justice in his commands but injustice in his judgments—or, according to your doctrine, justice in his judgments but teaches injustice in his commands. Although we dealt with this above, it was necessary to repeat it now (Deuteronomy 24:16).

3.35But if you say both are just, both what we say and what you say—that is, both what God’s law decreed and what Mani and the advocate of inherited sin invented—then, restraining the force of plain reason, we question you more gently and kindly. If you believe both what we say and what you say to be good, why have you stirred up all Italy with so much organized intrigue? Why have you hired crowds to raise riots in Rome? Why have you fed herds of horses throughout almost all Africa at the poor’s expense and sent them, with Alypius escorting them, to tribunes and centurions? Why have you corrupted worldly officials with the estates offered by wealthy women, so that the tinder of public fury would blaze against us? Why have you shattered the churches’ peace? Why have you stained a religious emperor’s reign with the wickedness of persecution, if we say nothing except what even you are forced to acknowledge as good?

3.36Enough of gentler speech. The brightness of blazing reason now shows that evil and good, profane and sacred, godly and ungodly, just and unjust have no partnership. Therefore there is no conflict between God’s commands and judgments. Charging people with others’ sins is contrary to commanding that those same sins must not be charged to them. Of these two, accepting one necessarily excludes the other; showing one just shows the other unjust. Yet God’s law prescribes that parents’ sins must not be charged to their children (Deuteronomy 24:16). Consequently, by that same authority, its opposite—the theory of inherited sin—has collapsed completely, together with the Manichaeans (2 Corinthians 6:14).

3.37I have certainly shown that what we defend is nothing other than what reason first identifies as entirely fair, what God then confirms in his law, and what, thirdly, was carried out with praise for the deed, precisely as we maintain the command should be understood. I have also repeatedly emphasized that this is true justice, which God showed to be pleasing to him by commanding it. Thus it has been established that the Manichaean transmission of sin finds no support either in reason or in the law’s testimonies (Deuteronomy 24:16) (2 Kings 14:5–6).

3.38But perhaps someone will be so obtuse as to demand explicit statements proving that God does not judge differently from the way he commanded judgment to be given. The demand itself is a wicked contention. Still, truth supplies weapons sufficient to satisfy every demand for proof, and I will gladly produce the strongest witnesses to this very point. Filled with the Holy Spirit, the prophet Ezekiel therefore says:

‘The Lord’s word came to me: Son of man, what do you mean by using this proverb in the land of Israel: The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge? As I live, says the Lord God, this proverb shall no longer be spoken in Israel. All souls are mine: the father’s soul and the son’s soul alike—all souls are mine. The soul that sins shall itself die.

‘But a man who is just, who practices judgment and justice, does not eat on the mountains or lift his eyes toward the objects of desire of the house of Israel; he does not defile his neighbor’s wife or approach a menstruating woman. He does not oppress anyone; he returns the debtor’s pledge and commits no robbery. He gives his bread to the hungry and clothes the naked. He does not lend his money at interest or take an excessive return. He keeps his hand from injustice and judges fairly between a man and his neighbor. He has walked in my commands and kept my ordinances by carrying them out. This man is just; he shall surely live, says the Lord God.

‘But suppose he fathers a corrupt son who sheds blood and commits sins. This son has not walked in the way of his just father; instead he has eaten on the mountains, defiled his neighbor’s wife, oppressed the needy and poor, committed robbery, and failed to return a pledge. He has fixed his eyes on idols and acted wickedly; he has lent at interest and taken an excessive return. This man shall not live. He has committed all these wicked deeds; he shall surely die. His blood shall be on himself.

‘But suppose this man fathers a son who sees all the sins his father has committed, is afraid, and does not act in the same way. He has not eaten on the mountains or lifted his eyes toward the objects of desire of the house of Israel. He has not defiled his neighbor’s wife or oppressed anyone. He has taken no pledge and committed no robbery. He has given his bread to the hungry and clothed the naked. He has kept his hand from wrongdoing, has taken neither interest nor an excessive return, has done justice, and has walked in my commands. This man shall not die for his father’s iniquities; he shall surely live. His father, however, because he inflicted suffering, committed robbery, and acted wrongly among my people, died in his own iniquity.

‘You have said: Why has the son not borne his father’s iniquity? Because the son has practiced justice, judgment, and mercy; he has kept all my statutes and carried them out. He shall surely live. But the soul that sins shall itself die. The son shall not bear his father’s injustice, nor shall the father bear his son’s injustice. The just person’s justice shall rest on himself, and the wicked person’s wickedness shall rest on himself.

‘If a wicked person turns away from all the iniquities he has committed, keeps all my commands, and practices judgment, justice, and mercy, he shall surely live and shall not die. None of the offenses he committed shall be remembered. Through the justice he has practiced he shall surely live. Do I really desire the wicked person’s death, says the Lord God, rather than that he turn from his evil way and live?

‘But if the just person turns away from his justice and commits iniquities, acting according to all the iniquities the wicked person has committed, he shall not live (Ezekiel 18:24). None of the righteous deeds he has done shall be remembered. In the offense by which he fell, and in the sins he committed, he shall die.

‘You have said: The Lord’s way is not right. Listen now, house of Israel: Is my way not right? Rather, your way is not fair. When the just person turns away from his justice and commits an offense, he shall die in the offense he committed; in that very offense he shall die. And when the wicked person turns away from the iniquity he committed and practices judgment and justice, he has preserved his soul and lives. Because he turned from all the iniquities he committed, he shall surely live and shall not die.

‘The house of Israel says: The Lord’s way is not right. Is my way not right, house of Israel? Is it not rather your way that is not right? Therefore I will judge each of you according to your own ways, house of Israel, says the Lord God’ (Ezekiel 18:1–30).

3.39Does God not appear a fully competent defender of his own judgments, when on this question he has not only passed judgment but also reasoned through so many points? Clearly, foreseeing the errors of our times, he justly and providently accomplished two things through the brightness and abundance of his words. First, no one should be unsettled by any ambiguity in the questions. Second, those who willingly plunged into shipwreck should have no plank of excuse remaining.

He speaks to the Jews, whose crimes had earned captivity. To divert the blame for their own disobedience, they claimed captivity was owed to their parents rather than to their own conduct. He confronts them with a father’s authority: ‘Why do you use this proverb: The parents ate sour grapes, and the children’s teeth were set on edge? As I live, says the Lord God, this proverb shall no longer be spoken in Israel. All souls are mine: the father’s soul and the son’s soul alike—all souls are mine. The soul that sins shall itself die’ (Ezekiel 18:2–4).

3.40To illustrate and confirm the fairness of his judgment, God uses an oath, adding a solemn pledge to the authority of his decree. The apostle understood this manner of speaking when he explained to the Hebrews: ‘God, wishing to show the heirs of the promise the unchangeable nature of his purpose, intervened with an oath, so that through two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we might have the strongest encouragement’ (Hebrews 6:17–18).

3.41He therefore says that these two things show God cannot lie: the fact that he promised, and the fact that he calls himself to witness that he will fulfill his promise. This does not mean that God’s word is normally weak or doubtful without such an attestation. Rather, to load his truth with weighty proofs, he adopted the kind of speech that makes even people accustomed to deceiving others believable. With this same weight God warns and commands in the present case: no one among his people should suspect what the advocates of inherited sin assert, and everyone should understand that God cannot judge in the way he condemns. ‘As I live, says the Lord God, this proverb shall no longer be spoken in Israel’ (Ezekiel 18:3).

3.42What does ‘It shall no longer be spoken’ (Ezekiel 18:3) mean, when the Manichaeans still maintain it today with such effort? It means this: no one belonging to the people of Israel, or accepting this Scripture’s authority, will dare believe such a thing after my ruling. Anyone who persists in that opinion neither obeys these writings nor will be counted among the true Israel (Romans 9:6).

3.43After exposing the emptiness of that proverb and ratifying his judgment by a divine declaration and oath, he also deigns to explain the reason for his justice: why relatives are not burdened with each other’s sins. ‘All souls are mine,’ he says; ‘the father’s soul and the son’s soul alike—all souls are mine. The soul that sins shall itself die’ (Ezekiel 18:4). Thus he also uses his ownership of souls to show why this measured judgment is perfectly fair.

3.44He says: Since the father’s soul is mine and the son’s soul is mine, it is utterly unjust and foolish for my possession, my image, to be burdened with another’s deeds. This testimony, like many others, teaches that the soul owes nothing to reproductive seed, since God claims it for his own authority (Genesis 1:26–27) (Ezekiel 18:4).

3.45I gave it this condition: no outsider could harm it against its will; instead it would freely embrace either sin or justice, either reward or guilt.

3.46So you are angry with me because I believe God under oath rather than Mani dreaming! Especially since Mani produces no testimonies of sound faith, or even arguments of an alert intelligence. Such arguments could never be found strong enough to overthrow truth’s foundations; still, if aptly expressed, they might at least offer some immediate relief from the shame of stupidity.

God persists in strengthening by an oath what he had made sacred by a command. He goes on to make his decree plain through examples. Suppose, he says, a man maintains every form of justice with unstained devotion and fathers a son who clings to corrupt behavior and turns away from his father’s paths. The noble standing acquired by his father’s great devotion to justice does that son no good. Conversely, he presents this sinner’s son avoiding his father’s ways by a better decision, and shows that his parent’s iniquity does him no harm. He places justice and sin on an equal footing, asserting that parents’ vices no more travel through reproductive seed than virtues can. All souls belong to his authority. This also exposes the irreverence of your claim that newborn children’s souls and bodies belong to the devil’s dominion (Ezekiel 18:5–18).

3.47Having established the balanced scales of his judgment, he was already condemning your opinion in people who thought similarly. ‘You have said: Why has the son not borne his father’s iniquity? Because,’ he says, ‘the soul that sins shall itself die. The son does not bear his father’s injustice, nor does the father bear his son’s injustice. The just person’s justice shall rest on himself, and the wicked person’s wickedness shall rest on himself’ (Ezekiel 18:19–20). Which of us could ever have discussed this with as much care as God did through his prophet’s mouth, distinguishing, comparing, and repeating the points?

3.48Yet, not content to explain this alone, he brings in another argument from the works of mercy to confirm this justice. He declares that past errors do not harm even the very people who sinned voluntarily, if they turn to repentance and reform. ‘If the wicked person turns away from the iniquities he committed and keeps my commands, none of the offenses he committed shall be remembered. Through the justice he has practiced he shall surely live’ (Ezekiel 18:21–22). That is: Since my merciful purpose is to forgive even people’s own sins when they reform, how could I charge newborn children with someone else’s? Or could things be so arranged that innocence is guilty before me when it is created, although it has power with me when it is recovered after having been interrupted?

3.49This displeased idol worshipers; and our faith, which you see shaped by this law, displeases you too. Those irreverent people therefore said: ‘The Lord’s way is not right.’ ‘Listen, then, house of Israel,’ he says. ‘Is my way not right? Is it not your way that is unfair? Therefore I will judge each of you according to your own way, says the Lord God’ (Ezekiel 18:29–30).

Do you see the testimonies defending us? Are we chasing ambiguities? Are we hunting for vague phrases? Are we defending faith with weak or tangled arguments? We condemn what God condemns; we understand what God explains; we discuss what God argued; we believe what God swore to uphold: ‘The son shall not bear his father’s iniquity, nor shall the father bear his son’s injustice. The just person’s justice shall rest on himself, and the wicked person’s wickedness shall rest on himself’ (Ezekiel 18:20). The way God promises to judge shines clearly: he charges neither children with their parents’ sins nor parents with their children’s. Thus Scripture’s testimony has also established what reason would not allow to be doubted: God maintains in his judgments the same justice he maintained in his commands.

3.50But perhaps you will try to deceive simpler hearers with this quibble: God was speaking here about adults, saying that their parents’ crimes do not harm those children who have canceled natural evil by the holiness of their own deeds. We must show that this trick accomplishes nothing. God has prescribed without qualification that parents’ iniquity does not condemn innocent children, but each person is convicted by personal iniquities; a faithful mind cannot doubt this. Still, let us handle again the corpse of your opinion, pierced by so many thunderbolts of the law. How far do you think this divine argument should extend? Does it mean that parents’ offenses harm neither adult nor newborn children? Or that they are prevented from harming only those already older and practicing justice, while little children, before draining away the natural poison through their own justice, are burdened by their parents’ crime—so that the very thing God denied through the prophet actually happens (Ezekiel 18:19–20)?

3.51Here is our reply. Then admit that the other proposition, which carries equal weight, also holds: parents’ righteous deeds benefit and sanctify their children, and fail to benefit only those who, once older, have worn away their inborn righteousness by their own crimes. God denied both propositions, explaining and repeatedly emphasizing each through the example of the other. Since you see that his denial opposes your reasoning and insist that it is false concerning infants, refute both its parts by the condition of newborn children. When you do so, you will commit two evils together: you will attack God’s pronouncement, and you will assert that a righteous person is born from a righteous person and a criminal from a criminal (Ezekiel 18:19–20).

3.52But if, unable to endure truth’s clamorous protest, you try to escape elsewhere, you will fall into stronger nets. Suppose you say: The prophet’s pronouncement that relatives are not burdened with each other’s faults is indeed true concerning adults; concerning infants, however, it lies in the part saying they are not guilty of their parents’ crimes, but does not lie in the part asserting that they gain no assistance from their parents’ virtues. Then you will openly display a most disgraceful appetite—not for argument but invention, not for eloquence but mere talk, not the appetite of a sane person but of a Manichaean losing his mind. You would be imagining yourself free to reject whatever you please and accept whatever delights you, against plain reason, God’s honor, examples, the testimony of commands, and the explanation of judgments (Ezekiel 18:19–20).

3.53Who are you, rushing to destroy fairness under the impulse of Marcion’s frenzy? Who are you, forcing both God’s judgments and his commands under the censorship of your tongue, still slippery from Manichaean mysteries? No one ever attempted this without first rejecting them. Will you dare, with Mani as your authority, to break God’s testament, which reason, fairness, devotion, and truth—as though a line of sacred witnesses—sealed through the prophets writing faithfully? You long ago lost both purity of understanding and the appearance of religion if you think the pronouncement in Ezekiel either offers support for your inherited sin or fails to contain its destruction (Ezekiel 18:19–20).

3.54‘The wicked person’s iniquity,’ he says, ‘is upon his own head. I will judge each of you according to your own ways’ (Ezekiel 18:20, 30). ‘Fathers shall not die for their children, nor children for their parents’ (Deuteronomy 24:16). ‘The soul that sins shall itself die. All souls are mine; I will judge each person for that person’s own iniquities’ (Ezekiel 18:4, 30).

3.55Look at the light, the crowd of pronouncements, the dignity of judgments that your inherited sin is unafraid to insult and tries to overrule! Here there is no doubt you will not be ashamed to say what seems the only remaining reply: the prophet’s pronouncement—or rather God’s through the prophet—is true, and the reasoning of wise people is invincible, teaching that charging children with their parents’ sins is utterly unjust (Ezekiel 18:19–20).

3.56You do not think the reproductive seed of all people is polluted by the guilt of an act of will; yet you claim this justice has no force in the case of Adam’s crime alone, and his is the one sin charged to everyone. I do not know how to respond first. Should I laugh, as your extraordinary absurdities demand? But the destruction of the many people you deceive calls for pity and tears. Should I therefore be overcome by earnest grief? Yet your monstrous arguments provoke laughter even in a sorrowful mind.

3.57If this age has any time left, who will be able to believe the written record that there existed a man who believed and swore that what was natural was not natural, that what belonged to generation did not belong to generation, and that what affected certain people solely because they were parents did not belong to the condition of parents? I think a future generation will consider these claims invented rather than defended by any mortal.

These are the lurchings, nausea, and vomitings your party and belief undergo. You say: Parents’ sins cannot flow to their children through nature, because an act of choice is not bound to reproductive seed; but Adam’s sin, conceived by his will, passes through nature to all people, because an act of choice is bound to reproductive seed. Again: God does not condemn children for their parents’ sins, because that is the height of injustice; but he condemns Adam’s descendants for their parents’ sin, which no justice can defend. Finally: What applied to Adam only because he fathered children under the law of marriage does not belong to the condition of generation by which spouses become parents.

Is this steering a course, or floundering? Is this digesting an argument, or feeling sick? Is this taking in anything solid, or constantly vomiting? In the same words you affirm what you denied; in the same lines you deny what you affirmed. And you are angry that we do not submit to a man so shattered by serious illness that he cannot retain what he takes in (Deuteronomy 24:16)!

3.58Even you see that this is not worth disputing. Still, we must help unwary minds that seize on the crudest opinions, flattering bad conduct, to comfort a wounded conscience. We therefore ask whether you discovered any occasion in Scripture for an invention of such stupidity. If you say, ‘Through one man sin entered the world’ (Romans 5:12), we remind you to reread the preceding book of this work. If you remember it, you will be unable to appropriate the apostle’s testimony.

3.59If, however, you say that one form of baptism consecrates people of different ages, you will admit, even if I say nothing, that it contains no mention of infected generation, diabolical flesh, or Adam. Although this does not concern the transmission of sin, we shall nevertheless answer it fully in its own place.

3.60Produce, then, at least one pronouncement of the law against the great authority of the witnesses we have brought forward, against manifest justice and clear reason—a pronouncement through which you can show you were deceived. I add that last phrase because even if some passage seemed, through ambiguous wording, to indicate such a thing, the brilliance and teaching of other pronouncements would compel it to be explained in a way consistent with justice.

3.61But as it is, not even a slight occasion for this opinion can be found in the holy Scriptures. On the other side, the faith we defend is fortified by examples and testimonies no less than by its own reasons. You are therefore completely possessed by a deadly obstinacy, believing that Manichaean dreams must be accepted at the expense of law, reason, wisdom, and justice.

3.62Still, attend to what we bring against this view. Even if you could prove that Adam’s sin is charged to his children, you would nonetheless agree that other parents’ crimes do not harm their offspring (Deuteronomy 24:16).

3.63It would therefore be clear that it was not generation but some other cause that made children appear liable for the sin of this one parent—before an unjust judge, however.

3.64Thus, just as the judge’s reputation would be stained by condemning the innocent, the condition of generation would be vindicated by the examples of other parents. For if the source of the transmission and the guilt lay in the work of reproduction, that condition would pollute all reproduction.

3.65But if the outcomes differed although the mode of generation did not, it would become entirely clear that even in the marriage whose guilt its offspring had shared, generation itself had not been corrupted.

3.66What, then, have we established? That the nonexistence of inherited sin is so certain that, even if you showed children punished for Adam’s sin, it would still be established that sins cannot be inborn and guilt cannot travel with reproductive seed, since you would admit that this does not happen in all reproduction. Consequently, even if vices were handed on to persons, they would not be mixed into conception.

But as it stands, you and I agree that a parent’s sin could not pass to children except through corruption and guilt in generation itself. Reason, examples, and the law agree that the condition of generation cannot possibly have been corrupted. Your own concession confirms this, for you say that no parents’ sins except those of two people pass to their children. It has therefore been established beyond defeat that the devil neither corrupted the first humans’ reproductive power nor made any sin capable of being born.

3.67We are asked, then, why we do not agree that sin is natural. We answer: Because the idea has no appearance of plausibility, much less truth, no appearance of justice or piety; because it makes the devil appear to be humanity’s creator.

3.68Because it fastens the charge of injustice upon God as judge.

3.69Because it weakens and destroys free will, the chief defense protecting Christ’s Church against various errors.

3.70By saying that all people are so incapable of any virtue that they are filled with ancient crimes inside their mothers’ wombs.

3.71Yet you invent a power for these crimes that not only drives out natural innocence but also afterward compels people throughout their entire lives into every vice.

3.72You swear that this law of sin remained and flourished even in the prophets and apostles, already illustrious through the great brilliance of their conduct and miracles, and even after the grace of Christ’s mysteries—which you suppose comes to the aid of all these outrages of your doctrine (Romans 7:23).

3.73Because it extinguishes efforts toward every kind of honorable conduct; because it comforts and increases moral obscenity by defaming God’s works, that is, human nature; because it exposes all the law’s commands to the charge of demanding the impossible—that is, to the charge of injustice.

3.74Because it contains no less indecency than irreverence, embracing shame concerning the genitals as its chief evidence.

3.75And because, in place of sacred authorities, it swells with accusations against God.

3.76It claims there is tyrannical excess in his commands.

3.77Savage injustice in his judgments.

3.78And Punic deceit in his oaths.

3.79Because, in place of arguments and every kind of logical demonstration, it relies on Mani’s dreams and madness.

3.80These, then, are the reasons that fire us to attack natural evil and make us disdain and despise association with the ruined.

3.81They ensure that all the world’s uproar frightens us no more than the sight of a rustling stand of bitter lupines shaken by filthy pigs or gusts of wind. [Literary allusion: Virgil, Georgics 1.75–76.]

3.82We therefore believe God to be just, good, and truthful. Consequently, we maintain that his law has commanded nothing impossible, his testimonies confirm nothing false, and his judgments pronounce nothing unjust. He himself is the creator of human beings, whom he creates liable to no crime, but full of natural innocence and capable of voluntary virtues.

3.83Taken together, these points require one of two conclusions: either God must be believed to be what the Manichaean advocate of inherited sin invents, or you, together with everyone accepting the doctrine of inherited sin, must be recognized as the kind of person the God we honor opposes. But God cannot be what Mani dreams. He is the good, just, and true God whom all holy Scripture, the whole law, and our faith worship. Consequently, such is your doctrine that, just as it is accepted by dishonoring God, it is destroyed by honoring him.

3.84It is time to move on to other matters. Yet the importance of the case requires us to supply even what we think we passed over in the preceding book. A sensible reader may judge this unnecessary. Still, experience shows that a case brought low by its dangers clings even to slight supports. It is worth taking away the consolations of those whose defenses you have removed.

3.85When we came to the apostle Paul’s statement that the advocate of inherited sin used to peddle to people unfamiliar with Scripture—‘Through one man sin entered the world’ (Romans 5:12; see this work 2.56–57)—I first showed that the wording itself excluded the advocates of inherited sin from the inner meaning of that passage. When the Teacher of the Gentiles traced sin’s antiquity, he placed a definite number as a powerful guard protecting generation. By saying sin entered the world through one man, he expressly indicated that he meant nothing about generation, which cannot occur except through two. I showed that a distinction had been made between parents’ sexual union and their sin: sin was indeed said to have entered the world, but through a number that could not apply to offspring. Throughout the book we argued sufficiently that the passage identifies not sin’s nature but its pattern, adopted by later transgressors through imitation, not generation.

Yet in the Letter to the Hebrews we read concerning the Jews: ‘They sprang from one, and him as good as dead’ (Hebrews 11:12)—that is, from Abraham. Earlier in the same letter, too, we read of Christ: ‘The one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one’ (Hebrews 2:11). The advocate of inherited sin might seize on one of these texts, or similar ones if any can be found, and argue that it weakens our answer. We said that ‘one’ was used for the person through whom sin passed so as to exclude generation from the meaning, yet in this letter generation is indicated by the mention of ‘one.’ For this reason, I thought the matter should be reconsidered. I urge the reader to pay attention: this objection will be destroyed in several ways.

Where Abraham is mentioned, his wife Sarah is included too. Here is the sequence of the words: ‘By faith the one called Abraham obeyed the call to go out to a place he was to receive as an inheritance, and he went out without knowing where he was going. By faith he lived in the land of promise as in a foreign land, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, co-heirs of the same promise. For he was waiting for the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. By faith Sarah herself, though barren, received power to conceive seed even beyond the usual age, because she believed the one who promised was faithful. Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, there sprang descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and as countless as the sand along the seashore’ (Hebrews 11:8–12).

After mentioning both Abraham and Sarah, and saying that she was past childbearing through old age but received the power to conceive seed by faith, he could confidently add that from one arose so many people, comparable in number to the stars. Both praise of the faithful and the truth of the event required the parents’ union to be described. But the art of praise prompted him, in commending the multitude descended from those two, to name one rather than both. He wanted to show how much steadfast faith had gained. Saying that God’s power had produced a multitude beyond counting, he judged it more fitting to praise God’s work by calling them descendants of one rather than two. This was especially so because the added praise in the final expression caused no loss to historical accuracy: he had already supplied that accuracy by mentioning both persons.

3.86In Hebrews, then, where generation is the subject, many are said to have arisen ‘from one.’ In Romans, however, where the apostle discusses sin, he says sin entered ‘through one man.’ (Hebrews 11:12) By that number he taught with complete clarity that he meant nothing about generation (Romans 5:12).

3.87Where it is said of Christ, ‘The one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one’ (Hebrews 2:11) (Romans 5:12), this can be understood as referring not to Adam but to God, by whose power Christ according to the flesh and the whole human race were made. Consequently, the similarity of other expressions has contributed nothing to undermine the apostle’s meaning when he said that sin entered the world through one man.

Yet what follows should stay firmly in the sensible reader’s mind: understand that so far I have argued far more leniently than the matter required. Let us allow that many testimonies show generation, which cannot happen except through two, is nevertheless commonly said to occur through one. The theory of inherited sin will still gain nothing. Why? Because some expressions are figurative or extended, and others are proper and exact. Things with proper names can lend their terms without suffering loss. But things spoken of in a borrowed sense are not allowed to impose the implications of their own definitions on the primary things to which the terms properly belong. All this happens without fault when we lend words to matters about which there is no doubt.

3.88But when something contrary to everyone’s opinion is introduced by an expression whose sound provides its whole support, a serious error is committed if its proper name is readily available but it is labeled with a borrowed, inexact term. When we are speaking of offspring, no one doubts that every person born has two parents, and this needs no corroboration. It will therefore not obstruct understanding if I say that someone was born from one person: my words will not so unsettle anyone that they think he could have been born without either a father or a mother.

3.89But when the subject is sin, which is represented as inborn against everyone’s opinion and all reason—

3.90And this sin is properly said to have passed through one person if he offered an example of wrongdoing, but most inappropriately if he implanted the sin by generation, since it could not pass to descendants except through two— (Romans 5:12)

3.91And the apostle has emphasized that sin passed, but through one, while truth has shown that this properly refers to an example—the advocate of inherited sin acts with intolerable shamelessness when he says that the number, bent into an inexact sense, can extend to his position too (Romans 5:12).

3.92It would be an unheard-of monstrosity if someone tried to establish even a tolerable but novel doctrine by abandoning exact expressions for inexact and ambiguous ones. How infinitely more disgraceful, then, that Augustine tries to establish obscene claims accusing God’s justice through statements so double-edged that he admits they speak properly against him and only by indulgence in his favor! What educated person would trust an argument that, once it came to court, his opponent could claim as a slave born in his household, while he himself could possess it only as a runaway he had kidnapped?

3.93The phrase in Hebrews, ‘All from one,’ is required by the praise of God, after the parents have first been mentioned. But what is said about Christ—‘The one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one’ (Hebrews 2:11) (Hebrews 11:12)—refers to God.

3.94Thus the apostle says to the Corinthians: ‘Just as woman is from man, so man is through woman; but all things are from God’ (1 Corinthians 11:12) (Romans 5:12). Thirdly, reason shows that even if neither of the two supporting points we offered existed, Paul’s statement that sin entered this world through one man would still have formed no alliance with the Manichaeans.

3.95Consequently, our answer remains unshaken. It shows that the apostle does not claim that generation was damaged and corrupted through one man. Rather, nature remains intact, and only the will of sinners is shown to be corrupt (Romans 5:12).

3.96But let us return to the book he addressed to Valerius, in which he selected statements from just one of my books for discussion and refutation. In the first book of the present work I had reached those statements of Augustine where his shamelessness was uncovered. Trying to escape the odium of an opinion that would seem to make the devil humanity’s creator, he declared that God is the author of evils and himself creates a substance of such a character that it incurs guilt before it acquires the use of reason, and is placed in the devil’s kingdom by its Creator’s hands.

3.97And that God is the potter fashioning vessels of wrath and destruction (Romans 9:22) (Romans 9:21).

3.98But vessels driven to destruction not by the course of their free will but by the power of their maker (Romans 9:22).

3.99He tried to strengthen this immense wickedness of a monstrous doctrine with statements of the apostle Paul, which I explained through the context of the entire passage. I also showed that the prophet Isaiah, from whom this potter comparison was admittedly taken, most fully defends the cause of divine justice (Isaiah 45:9) (Isaiah 29:16).

3.100I filled the second book with an exposition of the apostle, setting Augustine’s arguments against it, to the extent truth supplied me the ability. So now let us return to the sequence of his book.

3.101After putting forward one passage from the brief preface of my earlier work as though to attack it, and adding his claim about his god as the potter of sinners, he accuses me. Let his own words display how consistent and straightforward he is:

‘It is not, then, as you say while deceiving yourself and others, that anyone who says humans have free will or that God creates newborn children is called a Caelestian and Pelagian. The catholic faith says these things too. But anyone who says humans have free will to worship God rightly without God’s help, and anyone who calls God the creator of newborn children in such a way as to deny that he redeems infants from the devil’s power, is called a Caelestian and Pelagian. Both of us, therefore, say that humans have free will and God is the creator of newborn children. That is not why you are Caelestians and Pelagians. But that anyone is free to do good without God’s help, and that infants are not rescued from the power of darkness and thus transferred into God’s kingdom—these are your claims. That is why you are Caelestians and Pelagians’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.8; compare Colossians 1:13).

I have frequently shown you floundering in the swamp of your irreverence and fear; a sensible reader surely will not doubt it.

3.102In the first book, therefore, I showed that I had not lied when I wrote that everyone who fled the stigma of association with us fell over the precipices of the Manichaeans, who deny free will and God as humanity’s creator. I also showed that you immediately embraced, in entirely explicit language, what you had attempted to repel, even quoting the writings you sent to Boniface (see this work 1.14). Yet this answer of yours, which I have just quoted, admits the same thing. You said the catholic faith believes both in free will and in God as the creator of newborn children. Among all heretics, the Manichaeans are certainly the ones who deny both, along with you.

3.103But stripped of the substance of catholic faith, you put on its name alone like a thin cloak. You want us to believe that you too hold what catholics confess: that humans have free will and God creates newborn children. If you said this straightforwardly and faithfully, end the dispute by falling silent. Let the reputation of accusers return to us for having charged you with what your confident denial has erased. Add only this to your declaration: if any sect or argument is found trying by some reasoning to overthrow this twofold confession, which you have professed catholic, it is either not yours or no longer defended by you.

If you prefer to defend by substantial argument your denial of the positions in question, explain the definitions of free will and surround its boundaries, as with markers, by precise distinctions.

3.104And also maintain that God creates the kind of human beings fitting for his hands and his justice.

3.105You have certainly done neither. After replying that catholics acknowledge free will—and pretending to be one of them—you immediately added a definition taking away what you seemed to have granted. For you say: ‘But anyone who says humans have free will to worship God rightly without his help is called a Pelagian.’ And again: ‘We say that humans have free will; but you say that anyone is free to do good’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.8).

3.106When you claim we say everyone’s freedom of choice is sufficient to worship God rightly without his help, you are lying outright. Worship of God is understood in many ways: keeping the commands, condemning vices, simplicity of life, the ordering of sacred mysteries, and the depth of doctrines Christian faith embraces about the Trinity, the resurrection, and many similar matters. How could we say without distinction that free will is sufficient to worship him without God’s help, when we read the Lord saying in the Gospel: ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you hid these things from the wise and discerning and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, because this was pleasing in your sight’ (Matthew 11:25–26)?

Freedom of choice could not discover on its own all these things, whether doctrines or mysteries. Natural reason, however, could teach people not to worship idols or despise God, who became known as the Creator of the world itself, as the Teacher of the Gentiles testifies (Romans 1:20). Neither we nor any sensible person, then, says what you invent. We maintain that God makes a human being with free will, helps that person through countless forms of divine grace, and leaves that person able either to keep God’s commands or to transgress them. This is where we defend free will: while God shows his kindness in so many ways—commanding, blessing, sanctifying, restraining, inviting, enlightening—each person already using reason is free either to keep or to despise God’s will.

3.107We do not, then, believe that free will without God’s help is adequate for the worship offered by those initiated into the sacred mysteries. Rather, we acknowledge freedom of choice as a fully competent witness to divine fairness. When we must appear before Christ’s judgment seat and each receive what belongs to deeds done in the body, whether good or evil (2 Corinthians 5:10), God will be shown to judge nothing unjustly: he charges no one with a sin unless the person punished for it could also have avoided it.

3.108Your first statement, then, will gain nothing through its obscurity. Your second, in which you repeat that you acknowledge free will, yet do not believe any human being free to do good, has laid your whole inner self bare.

3.109Look: just as we did in the first book, we now press you closely to show how you have not denied free will. Let our reader remember that you have admitted catholics proclaim free will and God as the creator of newborn children—two things no one but a Manichaean ever denied. Yet although we both granted these in common, neither you nor your doctrine leaves freedom of choice intact. It follows completely that you and your doctrine retain nothing of the catholic faith.

I ask, then: what is the power of free will, and what is its definition? Certainly it has no power to change natural conditions. No one ever changed the functions of the senses within himself—for example, receiving sounds through the nose or smells through the ears. No one changed the characteristic of his sex; no one could pass into the form of another animal or, through free will, replace his body hair with a naturally grown fleece. No one could claim a body of whatever quality or size he wished. We may extend these examples to everything falling under this condition.

Let us move, then, from natural things to external circumstances. Whose will controls fruitful fields, successful voyages, noble birth and riches, or the continued standing of that nobility, so that he could say God made him with free will to acquire these or similar things for himself? Natural conditions follow fixed orders; external circumstances are always carried along by uncertain chances.

Where, then, does free will reside—the thing by which humans surpass beasts, by which they were made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26–27), and on which alone the justice of divine judgment rests? Where, I ask, is this free will, which the Manichaeans certainly deny and which you yourself admit catholics affirm? Undoubtedly in a person’s ability, without any unavoidable compulsion from natural conditions, either to direct his will into wrongdoing or to hold it back from wrongdoing.

3.110To illuminate this clear matter with a few examples: a person is as free to choose sacrilege as to refuse it; as free to choose the murder of a parent as to refuse it; as free to choose adultery as to refuse it; as able to give truthful testimony as false; as free to obey God’s command as the devil’s persuasion.

3.111In the preceding examples I emphasized a fully formed intention rather than the accomplishment of acts, because murder of a parent, sacrilege, adultery, and similar deeds are easier to avoid than to commit. An evil will does not always have the opportunity to carry out what it wants. Conversely, abstaining from these things involves complete quiet—unless you call the very unwillingness to toil a kind of toil. I pass over what holy Scripture, presented by prophets, evangelists, and apostles, and teachers shining with catholic soundness—John, Basil, Theodore, and others like them—have commended: committing crimes takes much greater effort than avoiding them.

3.112For now I stress what concerns the present question: free will was given for no other purpose, and can be understood in no other way, than that no one is dragged with a captive will either toward justice or toward injustice.

3.113Vices certainly have sweet enticements, and punishments inflicted by persecutors often bring bitter tortures. But the judgment of honor beats back the former, and the greatness of patience overcomes the latter.

3.114Yet possessing virtues is not a wretched business. Besides a kind of kingdom in a good conscience, it enjoys the promised height of eternal blessedness. The aids of God’s grace are also present, never abandoning the will on virtue’s side. Although grace has countless forms, they are always applied with such restraint that they never displace free will. They offer support for as long as the will chooses to lean on them, without overpowering a resistant mind. That is why, just as some people rise from vices to virtues, others also fall back from virtues to vices.

3.115How, then, do you acknowledge free will when you say it can do only one thing—evil—but cannot turn away from evil and do good (Psalm 34:14; LXX/Vulgate Psalm 33:15) (Psalm 34:14;)?

3.116For now I say nothing about the frenzy with which you rage against the whole law, believing that it commanded mortals things it saw they had no capacity to do.

3.117Instead I ask: with which poets did you stumble upon a Hippocrene like this, to invent a two-part beast—not by composing poetry but by blaspheming—whose body you fashioned from an evil necessity while coating only its face with the name of freedom?

3.118For in the work you sent to Rome you argue this way too: ‘The will, which is free in evil things, is not free in good things’ (Augustine, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians 1.7).

3.119And here you call someone a Caelestian for believing that anyone is free to do good. You therefore call free what you insist can do nothing but evil. Find, if you can, another definition of something unfree, and claim this as free! Even if you had lost your senses so completely that you could not see freedom’s definition in the thing itself, ought you not to have understood freedom’s essence from its opposite?

Suppose you were similarly uncertain what eyesight meant and defined it as follows: Sight means having the eyes gouged out, or being unable to see anything through some obstruction when it is time to see. Suppose you thought this definition fitted sight, but then turned to explain its opposite, blindness. You could find no other explanation except that, in an animal whose nature includes eyesight, the eyes have been gouged out or blocked by thick fluid, taking away the ability to see. You would surely come to your senses and recognize that one definition cannot fit contrary things.

Then, if blindness could mean only the deprivation of sight in an animal’s eye when it should be able to see, the definition of sight would emerge by denying the conditions used to explain blindness. Sight would be the proper capacity to see at the appropriate time, with eyes neither gouged out nor blocked. If you stubbornly resisted after this was shown, you would achieve only this: listeners would either think you opposed your own conscience with shameful obstinacy, or, if you convinced them that you really thought this way, they would judge your mind’s eyes as thoroughly gouged out as those of the person you had defined as possessing sight.

3.120To apply the example to our case, then: you could have understood what to call free from the definition of unfree. Even if your understanding grew dark when defining free will, so that you thought something could be called free while confined to one of two opposites, you should have noticed that captivity—that is, lack of freedom—can be explained only as being bound to one of two opposites. Freedom must therefore be named by denying captivity. Since what is unfree is forced to cling to one of the opposites, its contrary, what is free, cannot be bound to either.

3.121Since this is so, and you resist this point so miserably, it is uncertain which judgment better fits you: that you defend falsehood against your conscience, or think what is false to be true. Thus whether you have lost the eyes of reason remains uncertain, while it is certain that you have lost the eyes of faith.

3.122To repeat our conclusions briefly: free will is assisted on evil’s side by the pleasures of vice or the devil’s persuasions, and on good’s side by teachings of virtue and the various forms of divine grace. It cannot exist unless necessity is removed from it in respect of both justice and sin.

3.123Catholics acknowledge its reality. The advocates of inherited sin deny it, together with their teachers, the Manichaeans.

3.124We therefore spoke truly: those deceived by you become Manichaeans to avoid being called heretics. Fearing a false disgrace, they incur a real crime, like wild animals surrounded by a line of feathers to drive them into nets, forced into actual destruction by an empty fear.

We call God the creator of newborn children in this sense: since it is certain that the God of catholics, who is the true God, can do nothing evil, the dignity of the maker himself forbids belief that the human beings he makes come from his hands unjust and guilty before they use their will. By denying one of these points you undermine both. You say you believe God is the creator, but the creator of evil human beings. Consequently you contradict your own doctrine when you deny asserting that the devil creates humans.

3.125For when you attribute to God’s work the kind of beings he cannot make, you show that what you said he makes has nothing to do with God.

3.126Although we dealt with this more fully in the first book (see this work 1.52, 64), let us briefly state your meaning here too. You fear assigning any substance to the devil’s work, yet you do not fear fastening a great crime—not merely some small fault—on God. Human flesh’s nature commands more reverence from you than God’s justice. You feared attributing human substance to the devil as though that were an important matter, but attached the formation of wickedness to God’s justice and holiness as though they were unimportant. As if, between two opinions that are both false, attributing flesh to the devil’s works would not be more tolerable than attributing iniquity to God’s works!

3.128God, then, creates evil.

3.129And innocent people are punished for what God does.

3.130And the devil possesses them because God does this.

3.131And God charges people with the crime of his own hands.

3.132And what the devil weakly persuaded someone to do, God skillfully and persistently fashions, protects, preserves, and forms.

3.133And God demands the fruit of goodness from a person in whom he implanted evil at birth (Matthew 7:17–18).

3.134And afterward he lies throughout the whole law by saying that the Lord is just.

3.135And one capable of so many crimes is still called God?

3.136The Manichaeans’ memory will perish with a crash, because ‘the Lord remains forever; he has prepared his throne for judgment, and he himself will judge the world with fairness’ (Psalm 9:6–8; LXX/Vulgate Psalm 9:7–9) (Psalm 9:6–8;). There is no crime in God. He therefore does not create evil people: if they were evil by nature, God could not create them. Consequently, just as confessing God as creator of good beings belongs to catholics, believing God the creator of evil beings belongs specifically to Manichaeans.

3.137But let us examine the rest as well.

3.138[Augustine writes:] ‘Listen briefly, then, to what this question involves. Catholics say that the good Creator God made human nature good, but, corrupted by sin, it needs Christ the physician. Manichaeans say human nature was not made good by God and then corrupted by sin. Rather, the prince of eternal darkness created humanity by mixing two natures that always existed, one good and the other evil. Caelestians and Pelagians say the good God made human nature good, but it is so healthy in newborn infants that at that age they do not need Christ’s medicine. Recognize, then, your own name in your doctrine, and stop charging the catholics who refute you with someone else’s doctrine and name. Truth refutes both the Manichaeans and you.

‘For it says to the Manichaeans: “Have you not read that the one who made humankind from the beginning made them male and female? For this reason a man shall leave father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined, let no human separate” (Matthew 19:4–6). Thus it shows that God both creates human beings and joins spouses, against the Manichaeans who deny both.

‘To you, however, it says: “The Son of Man came to seek and save what was lost” (Luke 19:10). But you, excellent Christians, answer Christ: If you came to seek and save what was lost, you did not come to infants; they were not lost and were born safe. Go to older people. We lay down the rule for you from your own words: “The healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do” (Matthew 9:12).

‘Thus the Manichaean, who says an evil nature is mixed into humanity, at least wants the good soul saved from it by Christ. You, however, maintain that in infants, when their bodies are sound, Christ has nothing to save. Accordingly the Manichaean blames human nature in a detestable way, but you praise it in a cruel way. Whoever believes your praise will not offer their infants to the Savior’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.9).

I pointed out even in my first work that your chief aim is to be poorly understood.

3.139And I showed that most of your inventions require almost more effort to understand than to defeat.

3.140But if I wanted to do that with every point, I would seem needless by repeating the same things and lengthy by pursuing them all.

3.141Everything you have published against us rushes toward one goal: persuading us that natural things are evil and that either the devil creates humans or God creates crimes. Still, I think brevity will gain something if I gather from different places into one account the chief arguments with which, when you wrap yourself in obscurity, you think you defend your whole opinion. I will first help them by an explanation, making clear what they attempt; then I will overthrow them, gathered rather than scattered, unfolded rather than tangled.

3.142In the later parts of your book, after saying, ‘God creates evil people in the same way as he feeds and nourishes evil people,’ (John 12:31) you add:

‘For what he gives them by creating them belongs to the goodness of nature. When he gives them growth by feeding and nourishing them, he gives good assistance not to their wickedness but to that same good nature which he, being good, created. Insofar as they are human, there is the good of nature, whose author is God. But insofar as they are born with sin and will perish unless reborn, this belongs to the seed cursed from the beginning by the fault of that ancient disobedience (compare Wisdom 12:11). Yet the maker of even the vessels of wrath uses this well to make known the riches of his glory in vessels of mercy (Romans 9:22–23). Thus, if anyone belonging to the same mass is freed by grace, he should not credit his own merits, but “let the one who boasts boast in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:31).

‘Departing from this faith, this man refuses to allow that newborns are under the devil, so that infants will not be brought to Christ to be rescued from the power of darkness and transferred into his kingdom (Colossians 1:13). In this way he accuses the Church spread throughout the world, in which everywhere all infants about to be baptized are breathed upon in exorcism for no other reason than to cast the ruler of this world out of them’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.32–33; compare John 12:31).

Again, further down, you discuss sexual desire, without which spouses cannot unite. We defend it as natural and belonging to God’s work, not as some great good, but as a sensation of bodies made by God. You maintain that the devil implanted it in human inward parts, and, founding your doctrine on the shame surrounding it, you try to establish this in so many writings. About this same desire, then, as often elsewhere, you say in a later part of your book:

‘Therefore we do not criticize the honorable union of spouses because of the body’s shameful desire. Such union could have existed without any preceding commission of sin, and spouses would not have blushed for it. But this desire arose after sin, and their confusion forced them to cover it (Genesis 3:7). Hence later spouses, although using this evil well and lawfully, still avoid human sight during such an act. They thus acknowledge something shameful, although no one ought to be ashamed of something good. Therefore anyone who has lawful intercourse through shameful desire uses an evil well, while anyone who has unlawful intercourse uses an evil badly’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.36).

3.143[Augustine continues:] ‘For what makes both evil and good people blush is more rightly called evil than good. We do better to believe the apostle, who says, “Good does not dwell in my flesh” (Romans 7:18), than this man who calls it good.’

3.144A little later you add: ‘Human nature, whether born from marriage or adultery, is God’s work. If it were evil, it should not be generated; if it had no evil, it should not be regenerated. To sum up both points in one word: if human nature were evil, it ought not to be saved; if no evil were within it, it would not need to be saved. Whoever says it is not good denies a good Creator to the nature that was created. Whoever denies it contains evil begrudges a merciful Savior to the nature that was corrupted. Therefore, in the birth of human beings, adultery must not be excused because of the good created from it by the good Creator; nor must marriage be condemned because of the evil that the merciful Savior must heal there’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.36).

I have quoted these many passages from your writings, in which you endured great labor of thought to seem to say something clever. In keeping with our practice of using no tricks, and in confidence in the truth, they ought to be distinguished through our restatement, because your words are scarcely intelligible. You said, then, that the Manichaeans condemn flesh’s nature and maintain that humanity was made by mixing two natures, one good and the other evil. You said that we, whom you call heretics, say human nature was made by the good God and is good on its maker’s testimony, but is so healthy in infants that they do not need Christ’s medicine. Your own claim is that Adam’s nature was once good, made by the good God, but was corrupted by sin and therefore needs Christ’s medicine.

In the first book of this work I set your opinions beside the Manichaeans’ and showed that your faith differed in no way from their irreverence, from which it clearly sprang. There it appeared that fear unites you with Jovinian, but love wholly unites you with Mani. We must discuss this in the present context too, but first I distinguish our views, then yours. You correctly said we maintain that the good God made human nature good. But only this much is ours. You either failed to notice or suppressed one part needed to complete our position and inserted another of your own that is not ours. For we do not merely say God made human nature good in Adam. We say that in all infants it is created good by the same God who made that first human being. That is why we affirm that he creates all people.

3.145You not only removed this part from our definition; in its place you inserted your own, which could arouse hostility at first glance but would disappear under examination. You wrote that we say nature was made good by the good God, but is so healthy that it does not need Christ’s medicine. See how short of truth you are, when you do not shrink from such obvious theft even in terms called opposites! Having first put ‘good nature,’ you then added ‘so healthy.’ Is ‘healthy’ the opposite of ‘good’?

Surely when we say ‘good,’ its proper opposite is nothing but ‘evil.’ If the subject requires us to say ‘healthy,’ we put ‘weak’ or ‘sick’ opposite it: if it is healthy, it is not weak; if weak, it is not healthy. But when we say ‘This is good,’ we identify its contrary with the word ‘evil,’ not with ‘healthy.’ You should therefore have said that we define human nature as created good by God, and as so good in infants that it needs no one to correct the way it was made. Or, if you preferred to indicate goodness by the different term ‘health,’ you should have marked the entire statement with consistent language.

Instead you slip like a little eel between the rocks of definitions. Truth forced you to admit that we call human nature good and made by the good God. Seeing much reason but no grounds for hostility in that part of the statement, you immediately shifted to other words, adding that we defend it as so healthy that we do not believe Christ’s medicine necessary for it. If you stumble into all this through ignorance, you prove utterly dull; if you do it by cunning, utterly crafty.

3.146Here is my brief answer: far from denying Christ’s medicine to infants, whom we know to be innocent, we acknowledge that they especially need it in greater abundance. They are born tiny and weak, unable not only to feed themselves through their own labor but even to ask their parents for help. They are exposed to so many accidents that even milk that is too thick, and often the sleep of those nursing them, can cause their death.

3.147Because their bodies are mortal, they also encounter the hardships of illness, the suffering of pain, and the dangers of disease. We therefore acknowledge Christ’s medicine as necessary not only to infants, whom he also made, but to the nature of all mortals.

3.148Just as its infirmities are eased in this present life by various remedies, so they will also be removed completely at the coming resurrection—in the bodies of the righteous, however.

3.149See, then, in how many respects we acknowledge Christ’s medicine necessary to human nature. But I know you will cry out that I am quibbling with you: you did not mean medicine that helps bodies; by ‘medicine’ you meant Christ’s grace, which you claimed we deny. You could be answered that this is your fault, since you refused to identify with proper terms what you wanted understood. Yet now that we have understood, even belatedly, which medicine you meant—the medicine you falsely and vaguely alleged we deny—let us answer this second point too. As we declared in our first work, we acknowledge Christ’s grace, that is, baptism, from the time Christ established its rite, to be necessary for all ages alike. We pronounce an eternal anathema on anyone who denies that it benefits even infants.

3.150Since we repeatedly stress this in a clear profession, you are convicted of a public falsehood when you write that we defend human nature as so good that, being healthy in infants, it does not need Christ’s medicine.

3.151Yet this grace, because it is also called medicine, makes some people good from being evil, while preserving the law of justice. But infants, whom God makes good by creating them, it makes better by renewing and adopting them (Titus 3:5) (Romans 8:15).

3.152It is therefore clear that we do not deny the benefit of Christ’s grace to infants. What controversy remains, then, for which the advocate of inherited sin accuses us of error? That we do not agree that Adam’s nature was made good but everyone else’s evil? I freely acknowledge that we not only refuse to agree but attack this with all our strength. Put aside, then, those childishly twisted nets of your inventions and the popular bogeys through which you whispered that we deny Christ’s grace to the cradle. Let us contend over the central issue of the dispute. Following the order I promised, now that I have defended our views, let us weigh yours and those of Mani, whom you pretended to oppose.

3.153He says, then, that the prince of darkness, the author of evil, created humanity by mixing two natures, good and evil. What do you say? That the good God indeed creates human beings, but creates them all evil.

3.154Thus between you and Mani there is no disagreement about nature’s character, only about its author. You charge to God, whom you acknowledge as infants’ creator, the same evil Mani charges to the prince of darkness, whom he considered human nature’s maker. Little obstacle remains to renewing your alliance. Soon, however, I shall show that although neither of you shows any trace of truth, his statements agree with one another better than yours do.

What do we say? Undoubtedly something opposed to both of you: neither did the good God make an evil nature, nor did the prince of darkness make or mix another nature. Rather, the one God, author of all things, not only made human nature good at first but also makes it good in every newborn child. Yet we profess the help of its Creator to be both useful in many ways and necessary to it. The making of creatures is one matter and gifts another; and the work is not valued more highly here than the craftsman.

Both you and Mani therefore equally establish natural evil: you both call human nature evil, but he does so more consistently, you more deceitfully. Both of you suppose this evil was breathed by the devil into human inward parts. He exempts no one’s birth from it. You, however, to seem different in some way—although there is no difference—try to exempt just two human beings. Yet you do not free even their persons from sin. With the advance of a more learned intelligence, you say that what you persuade us became natural through them was not natural in them. So, lest your fraud escape punishment even here, the added stupidity punished the theft you committed against your teacher. To believe natural what you admit was adopted by the will is an invention not merely of an uneducated mind but of a drunken one. More about this elsewhere; for now, let us press the matter.

Mani maintains that evil is natural; you agree. He says sins are born; you consent. He says human nature is evil; you confirm this too. He says the nature of absolutely everyone; here you resist, asking that the first pair be set aside. Yet you do not vindicate even them from guilt; rather, you affirm that they originated natural evil. Even if we could indulge you in this, your teacher will not. Perhaps he will even punish your slow intelligence with a schoolmaster’s rod, forcing you either to submit to his authority or to leave his school altogether. Finally he draws his conclusion: an evil nature cannot have a good author. Therefore humanity, which both of you acknowledge to be naturally evil, is the work of the prince of darkness, that is, the devil.

3.155But you rise up completely against this last point. Although you boarded the same ship as Mani and the same wind directed your course, once across the strait you thought you should nevertheless disembark on a different shore. Perhaps, however, choosing an immediate advantage may make hesitation tolerable, even if late. Into what harbor, then, do you steer your vessel? ‘I say,’ you answer, ‘that God is good, yet he also creates evil beings.’ What an escape from danger—straight onto the rocks! You wanted to pour the whole of Mani’s bilge over the one you consider God.

3.156It is therefore perfectly clear that his opinion has more consistency: if something evil were created as such by nature, it would indicate an author resembling itself.

3.157Truth, however, first lays down that what is as its nature compelled it to be cannot be called evil—that is, sin—and that sin is nothing other than a free will straying from the path of justice.

3.158These defenses protect the innocent nature of all things, which, remaining as it was created, is proved liable to no crime.

3.159Evil, then, cannot be natural. Consequently, no creature is guilty by nature, nor is its author evil. For evil is found not to be a subsisting nature. Just as every creature is good insofar as it is created, so God, the author of good natures, is proved entirely good, stained by no crime in his work. Everything Mani brought forward is therefore overthrown by this single catholic argument (1 Timothy 4:4).

3.160Yet the man slain by the thunderbolt of such clear truth seems still to breathe in some respect when compared with you. His whole doctrinal structure collapses when only its foundation gives way. But three things in your case totter as his one does. Consider, then, whether any part of your building can rise.

Mani thought sin natural, though it can only be voluntary, and so laid his foundations in empty space. The rest he placed consistently alongside: since sin is natural, nature is evil; an evil thing cannot have a good author; therefore the whole human race must be attributed to the prince of darkness. All this could have stood, had truth not undermined his first claim: sin, a work of free will, cannot be shown natural, and whatever is natural cannot be sin.

3.161By overthrowing his first definition, the wedge of reason brought his rooftops crashing to the ground. What hope have you, then, whose three claims stand on ground as slippery as his one? First you say sin is natural. Second, that God is good although he creates, shapes, and extends evils—that is, sins. Third, that an act of will has been mixed into reproductive seed. Each of these three heads of your definitions totters in itself. Totters, I say? Rather, like ropes made of sand, they fall apart before coming together.

One claim—natural sin—already lies destroyed in the direct defeat of Mani. The other two, peculiar to your opinion, fell in the same familiar destruction that struck him. If he could not establish that humans are born guilty through either an evil nature or the prince of darkness, how much more foolish are you, who added an accusation against God to demonstrate newborn children’s crimes! Just as nature cannot be sin—the thunderbolt that shattered Mani’s doctrine—so, conversely, what is sin cannot be natural. An act of will does not pass into the condition of a substance, as you suppose happened. Much more certainly, the good God never creates evil beings. Thus it has become clear that sin cannot exist in a newborn whom God creates.

3.162The matter is clear and was sufficiently established in my first work. Yet because you wanted to be so deceitful as to attempt a distinction between yourself and Mani, I must now press the case. It must be clear that we have answered not only your past statements but also anything you may try to introduce afterward. We say, therefore, that God’s work in a newborn is so good that the natural characteristics of its substance need no corrector. Anyone who judges that what he acknowledges God made ought to have been made differently undoubtedly criticizes the one he acknowledges as the maker of a creature supposedly needing correction into another form.

3.163Thus, while maintaining in every newborn the approval and measured praise due to created natures, we say that increases of divine benefits are useful and necessary to all ages alike. Yet neither virtue nor sin is attributed to anyone without that person’s own will.

3.164God’s mercy is nevertheless shown still richer in this: he sanctifies infants who do not know it. That belongs to the praise of mercy, whereas their ignorance leaves them unstained by guilt; that belongs to the laws of fairness.

3.165But I am speaking of the virtues we acquire through the use of fully developed reason. Since it was necessary to stress this here, as often elsewhere, I now urge the reader to attend to what follows. The reader will see that advocates of inherited sin differ from Manichaeans in nothing, offering against us as arguments only what is contained in their books. I already demonstrated this in the fourth book of my first work.

3.166But since, after those books were published, a letter of Mani was found in Constantinople at your request, most blessed father Florus, and sent to these regions, it is worth inserting some of it. Everyone can then understand where these arguments for inherited sin originate.

3.167In that first work I had already argued about fleshly desire or pleasure, also called lust, implanted in the sexes for the reproductive activity of generation. I showed that it is nothing other than one of the body’s instruments, implanted alike in rational and irrational beings and belonging to God’s work, since he equipped our flesh with sensations. Yet Augustine attacks it fiercely, calling it evil—that is, natural sin and the parent of every sin. He tries to persuade us chiefly from its shame, and mocks me for being ashamed to name it directly.

3.168So I too will now briefly vindicate the character of this thing, which in my earlier writings I defended by making distinctions against Mani’s attack, by exposing its accusers—who nevertheless profess that they serve it unwillingly.

3.169What your books contain, then, old Augustine, is this: ‘Desire arose after sin, and their confusion forced them to cover it’ (Genesis 3:7) (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.36; compare Genesis 3:7).

3.170And again: ‘Anyone who has lawful intercourse through shameful desire uses an evil well; anyone who has unlawful intercourse uses an evil badly. For what makes both evil and good people blush is more rightly called evil than good. We do better to believe the apostle, who says: “Good does not dwell in my flesh”’ (Romans 7:18; Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.36). Elsewhere: ‘Desire is not the good of marriage, but the obscenity of sinners, the necessity of those who generate offspring, the heat of wantonness, the shame of marriage’ (Marriage and Sexual Desire 1.13). And this: ‘What they afterward did in producing offspring is the good of marriage; what they first covered in confusion is the evil of desire, which everywhere avoids being seen and seeks privacy out of shame’ (Marriage and Sexual Desire 1.8).

These and the other things you regularly use for this argument come more from your memory than your intelligence. Mani, then, labored to compose what he thought clever; you were disappointed in thinking you could conceal what you had read and retained.

3.171Listen now, then, and recognize what your father writes to a certain daughter of his, your sister.

3.172‘Mani, apostle of Jesus Christ, to his daughter Menoch. May grace and salvation be given you from our God, who truly is the true God. May he enlighten your mind and reveal his justice to you, because you are a fruit of divine stock.’ A little later: ‘Through them you too have been made radiant by recognizing what you were before and from what kind of souls you flowed—a kind mixed with all bodies and attached to flavors and various forms. For just as souls are generated from souls, so the body’s formation is drawn from bodily nature. Therefore, “What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). Understand spirit, however, to mean soul: soul from soul, flesh from flesh.’

3.173You surely recognize how explicitly Mani affirms the transmission of souls by descent, and which testimony he uses to condemn flesh: precisely the one constantly on your lips, ‘What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of spirit is spirit’ (John 3:6).

3.174He therefore stresses, not merely by saying it but by repeating it, that belief in souls’ transmission by descent is characteristic of his doctrine. He also tries to establish it through the analogy of bodies generating offspring: ‘Just as souls are generated from souls, so the body’ (John 3:6)s formation is drawn from bodily nature; and as flesh comes from flesh, so soul comes from soul.’ But let us proceed to the rest: ‘Just as God is the author of souls, so the devil, through desire, is the author of bodies. Thus, in the devil’s birdlime, through a woman’s desire, the devil snares not souls but bodies—’

3.175‘Whether through sight, touch, hearing, smell, or taste. Remove, then, the root of this evil stock, and immediately you see yourself as spiritual. For Scripture says: “Desire is the root of all evils” (Romans 7:23)’ (compare 1 Timothy 6:10).

You see in what spirit and for what doctrine Mani attacks fleshly desire, calling it the law of sin: if it were removed from bodies, his daughter, to whom he writes, would see that she had become spiritual. Let us hear which statements of the apostle he tries to use to establish this opinion: ‘“The flesh opposes the spirit,” because it is the daughter of desire; “and the spirit the flesh,” because it is the son of the soul’ (Galatians 5:17).

3.176You understand that the innermost substance of Mani’s doctrine has been exposed—the substance from which your faith grows. Now he goes on to accuse us, that is, catholics: ‘See, then, how foolish they are who say this bodily formation was created by the good God, when they know it is generated by the spirit of desire.’

3.177‘For they come together while the mind is unwilling, and act in secret shame. At that time they hate the light, so that their deeds will not be exposed (John 3:20). This is why the apostle says, “It is not of the one who wills” (Romans 9:16)—understand: this act. If we do good, it is not of the flesh, because “the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication,” and the rest (Galatians 5:19). If we do evil, it is not of the soul, because “the fruit of the spirit is peace and joy” (Galatians 5:22). Finally, the apostle also cries to the Romans: “I do not do the good I want, but I perform the evil I abhor” (Romans 7:19). You see the voice of the soul resisting desire and defending the soul’s freedom. It grieved because sin—that is, the devil—produced every desire within it (Romans 7:8). The law’s authority shows its evil by condemning all its uses, which the flesh admires and praises. Everything bitter to desire is sweet to the soul; through this the soul is nourished and summoned to strength. Indeed, the mind of someone restraining himself from every use of desire stays awake, grows rich, and increases; through the use of desire it usually diminishes.’

Do you now understand, even belatedly, that we have discovered the source not only of your thinking but of your language? You embrace your teacher with such love that you follow not merely his routes but even his footprints. All your writings assert this, as both the books you published under Marcellinus’s name and those you addressed to Valerius testify: this fleshly desire, which you also call shameful, was mixed into human bodies by the devil.

3.179Yet by argument and by appropriating Scripture’s testimonies, you maintain that this desire, which you call the law of sin, both polluted him and all the saints and drew their complaints (Romans 7:23).

3.180What does Mani say? ‘The devil creates bodies through desire. Through it he snares bodies, not souls. Remove the root of evil stock,’ he says, ‘and you will become spiritual. About this the apostle cries to the Romans: “I do not do the good I want, but I perform the evil I abhor”’ (Romans 7:19). He also calls us foolish for saying that this bodily formation belongs to God, although we acknowledge that it was generated through desire.

You see, then, how fully you and Mani agree in attacking us. You fight with his words, rely on his arguments, and call us liars for saying you not only were his disciple, as you yourself write, but still are. Yet even here he is more sensible. Believing this fleshly desire was introduced by the devil, he concluded that whatever appeared produced from diabolical desire must be acknowledged not to belong to God’s work.

3.181You are duller: you call a human being the fruit of diabolical desire, yet assign him to God’s works. You do not say he was made good from evil, but that he is evil and produced from an evil root, yet has a good author—while the devil claims him as the fruit of his own root (Matthew 7:17–18).

3.182For in your words, the devil rightly plucks all who are born from desire as fruit from his own tree (compare Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 1.26). You therefore revile us just as Mani does for maintaining that fleshly desire was created by God.

3.183And that statement of yours, which I examined in my earlier work—‘Sometimes desire does not act when the mind is willing, although sometimes it acts when the mind is unwilling’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 1.7)—and your accusation of its arrogance because it stirs against the mind’s will: all this is expressed not merely in Mani’s ideas but in his words. Having criticized us for saying God makes human beings although we admit they are conceived through the pleasure of those coupling, he says: ‘Fools say what they know is generated by desire was created by God, although they couple while the mind is unwilling.’

3.184As for your statement, ‘It is the evil of desire that everywhere avoids being seen and seeks privacy out of shame’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 1.8), Mani says the same: ‘They act in secret shame; at that time they hate the light, so that their deeds will not be exposed’ (John 3:20).

3.185You say: ‘Anyone who has lawful intercourse through desire uses an evil well’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.36). You remind us to believe instead the apostle, who said good did not dwell in his flesh, and you want what is not good—that is, the evil dwelling in the apostle’s flesh—to be understood as fleshly desire (Romans 7:18). Mani put it no differently. After saying, ‘So that their deeds will not be exposed,’ he adds: ‘This is why the apostle cries to the Romans: “I do not do the good I want, but I perform the evil I abhor” (Romans 7:19) (John 3:20). He grieved because sin—that is, the devil—produced every desire in him (Romans 7:8). The law’s authority shows desire’s evil by condemning every use of it, which the flesh admires and praises.’

3.186You thought it would be highly effective in maintaining a distinction between you and Mani to say that nature was indeed made good, but only in the first humans, while afterward it was entirely overthrown through desire. Mani argued this way too: ‘It is worth observing that the first soul, which flowed from the God of light, received this structure of the body to govern it with its bridle. The commandment came; sin, which had seemed captive, came to life again. The devil found his own limbs, brought the material of desire into the soul by deception, and through it killed the soul. The law is indeed holy—but holy for a holy soul; and the commandment is just and good—but for a just and good soul’ (Romans 7:9–12) (compare Romans 7:9–12). Similarly in his letter to Patricius, he calls the first human ‘better than those who followed, as though made from the flower of the first substance.’

It is therefore no great thing, and contributes nothing to your defense, that you thought Adam should be excluded from the accusation against human nature. We shall soon discuss his condition more fully. Here it is enough to have shown that nothing in your ideas is so fresh that Mani has not already worn it out by rolling it over.

3.187He persists in attacking us and adds: ‘As for those who have dared call this desire good against the evangelical and apostolic books, which they read to no purpose, you can see their saints sometimes sleeping with their daughters, sometimes carrying on with several concubines and wives. They do not see the apostle’s question: “What partnership is there between light and darkness, a believer and an unbeliever, Christ and Belial?” (2 Corinthians 6:14–15) (Genesis 19:30–38). They wander wrapped in desire’s cloud, enjoying its poison so much that, seized by madness, when they do this they think God has permitted it. As though they did not know the apostle said: “What they do in darkness is shameful even to mention” (1 Timothy 1:7)’ (Ephesians 5:12).

You surely see how he presses the matter of shame and thinks it tells powerfully against us, because we dare not call evil what we nevertheless acknowledge must be covered through modesty. Thus you have woven no garment to cover your doctrine’s deformity except the rags you accepted in your father and teacher’s inheritance.

He keeps rising up against us and turns directly to his opponent: ‘Come, defender of desire, describe its fruits and works in plain words. See, in opposing it I do not fear the light which it dreads and hates. “Everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light, so that his deeds will not be exposed” (John 3:20) (Genesis 16:1–4). Do you see that desire is the source of evil, through which miserable souls serve lust unwillingly, because this is the only thing we do while the mind is unwilling?’

This is the source of your own statement: ‘Why is it that moving the lips, tongue, hands, and the bending of the back, neck, and sides for their proper tasks lies in our power, but when it comes to sowing children, the organs created for this task do not obey? Instead we wait for desire, as though acting under its own authority, to stir them; sometimes it fails to act when the mind is willing, although sometimes it acts when the mind is unwilling’ (Genesis 29:21–30) (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 1.7). You listed the functions of all the bodily members, emphasized their obedience to the will’s command, and said desire’s activity is the only thing we do against the mind’s will. What does Mani say? ‘Do you see that desire is the source of evil, through which miserable souls serve lust unwillingly, because this is the only thing we do while the mind is unwilling?’

But let us see what else he adds: ‘Every sin is outside the body, because it consists in action; but the fornicator sins against his own body (1 Corinthians 6:18). Every sin does not exist before it is committed, and afterward only the memory of the act remains, not its actual form. But desire’s evil, because it is natural, exists before it is enacted, increases while it is enacted, and afterward both appears and remains.’ Why, then, quarrel with us for calling you a Manichaean, when his writings contain nothing but what you say, and yours nothing but what he wants to persuade us to believe?

And that saying circulating on ordinary people’s lips, though put there by you, is contained in this same letter of Mani: If sin is not natural, why are infants baptized, when they plainly have done no evil themselves? I said it flies over many people’s tongues because it is a more popular argument, understood even by the slowest. In your books, however, you place your entire hope on it. Your teacher develops this very point as follows: ‘I must ask them in these words: If every evil consists in action, why does anyone receive purification by water before doing evil, when he has done no evil personally? Or if he has not yet acted but needs purification, it is possible to show that they are by nature shoots of evil stock—those very people whose madness prevents them from understanding either what they say or what they confidently affirm’ (compare 1 Timothy 1:7).

Do you hear how he insults us? He calls us mad and unable to understand what we say or affirm, because we deny that people are shoots of evil stock, although we baptize in purifying water even those who have done no evil—that is, infants. Many passages from his statements have now been quoted. Yet if the heading did not name his daughter Menoch and Mani, who calls himself Christ’s apostle, they would altogether announce you as their author (see this work 3.172). Since you say nothing except what you learned from Mani’s teaching, do you think catholics should regard you differently from the man through whom you drank in the mysteries of these doctrines?

3.188It remains to examine your statement which, promising to reduce it to one expression, you gathered up briefly—and, it must be admitted, rather cleverly: ‘If human nature were evil, it should not be generated; if it had no evil, it should not be regenerated. To sum up both in one word: if human nature were evil, it ought not to be saved; if no evil were within it, it would not need to be saved’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.36).

Here you must not be cheated of praise for your intelligence. From your standpoint it could not have been said better. Yet the nature of things prevents even precise cunning from accomplishing anything. It is altogether hard for you to kick against the goad (Acts 26:14). Whatever you put together melts like ice when the fire of truth is brought near. Now attend to our reply. You concluded: ‘Surely if human nature were evil, it ought not to be saved.’ We agree; you spoke entirely truly. If it were evil, it ought not to be saved, because something evil by nature would neither deserve nor be capable of salvation. Why incapable? Because it could not become other than it had been made. Why undeserving? Because nothing in it would be worthy of deliverance by God’s mercy.

When we say ‘if it were’ about what certainly cannot exist, we are not giving hope that the denied possibility can occur. Rather, to destroy another opinion that arises, we commonly speak about impossible things. For example: If this or that existed, that consequence would undoubtedly follow. Since the first cannot exist, the conclusion introduced in order to remove it is denied all the more. We have already shown frequently that nothing can be evil by nature. Nevertheless, without prejudice to that settled point, we now approve the part of your statement saying, ‘If human nature were evil, it ought not to be saved.’

You located salvation in baptism and argued consistently that if the Manichaeans, who call nature evil, spoke truly, Christians would be foolish to believe baptism’s remedy should be applied to an evil nature. Thus anyone affirming that human nature is evil is forced to deny grace. This also works in reverse: anyone affirming grace praises human nature, understanding grace to have been provided for its salvation.

3.189Observe the conclusion: denying grace does not attach to praising human nature. Rather, these four positions are so connected that one cannot be maintained without the other: defaming nature produces denial of grace, and praising grace produces commendation of nature. These implications can run in either direction. You therefore spoke well: ‘If human nature were evil, it ought not to be saved’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.36). The Manichaeans say both things: flesh’s nature is evil, and it neither can nor ought to be saved through grace.

3.190But afterward you introduce the statement dear to you: ‘If no evil were within human nature, it would not need to be saved. Whoever says it is not good denies a good Creator to the nature created; whoever denies it contains evil begrudges a merciful Savior to the nature corrupted’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.36). Let the reader pay attention: you will see that he has said nothing other than what he had denied should be said. You have pronounced evil naturally present in the very thing you said was not naturally evil.

3.191But an evil nature can mean nothing other than something having evil inborn within it.

3.192To make the conclusion brief and plain: if evil exists in nature in such a way that evil is born from it with the reproductive seed itself, that nature is undoubtedly proved evil.

3.193But if nature is vindicated from evils and defended as good, evil can neither be born from it nor naturally exist within it. Your conclusion has therefore vanished: the statement you introduced second did not distinguish itself from the first but duplicated it.

3.194‘If human nature were evil,’ you say, ‘it ought not to be saved; if no evil were within it, it would not need to be saved’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.36). What have you shown except that one thing ought to be saved for the very reason you had denied that it ought to be saved?

3.195Consequently you have come back to restoring by argument the Manichaean whom you despised in your profession. Saying, ‘If it were evil, it ought not to be saved,’ you assumed the appearance of fighting him. Adding, ‘But if no evil were within it, it would not need to be saved’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.36), you showed that you serve him faithfully. It has therefore become clear that your pronouncement contains the same as Mani’s: human nature is evil, since both you and he say evil exists within it. And you have declared that an evil nature ought not to be saved. It has thus been established completely that your faith, with its forces wholly united to his, attacks both nature and grace.

3.196It follows that no one can praise Christ’s grace without praising the Creator’s good work in nature.

3.197Certainly the question here does not concern adults’ pursuits, but only the condition of newborns, in whom nature’s state is examined. Alongside Mani, you maintain that this nature, without any contribution from its own will, is guilty, condemned, and full of evils—that is, crimes. We defend it as guiltless, free from wickedness and the evil of sin, and capable of virtue.

3.198Do you therefore charge this nature in infants with being criminal, corrupt, and condemned because of its own will or because of the condition of birth? If through its own will—so that those infants are said to have sinned by their own efforts—a monstrous opinion arises, but inherited sin is denied: someone did not receive from another what he could commit himself. But if it receives so many evils not by its own action but by its condition, it is proved naturally unjust.

3.199Where, then, do you and Mani differ in your judgment of nature? ‘He admits it is evil,’ you say. If you deny that, then pronounce it good, and the dispute is over. Truth’s nets will immediately catch you for salvation. But you protest. Let us hear what you bring forth, Aristotle of the Carthaginians! ‘So much evil exists within it,’ you say, ‘that the devil possesses it and it deserves eternal fire.’

3.200‘Yet it is so far from evil that no one but a Manichaean can accuse it.’

3.201‘Nevertheless,’ he says, ‘I am no Manichaean, although I acquit it with words and condemn it with judgments.’

3.202What should I accuse first here: the liar’s shamelessness, the debater’s appetite, or the irreverence of believing such perverse things? Yet I understand that we should use the prophet’s words: ‘We are blessed, Israel, because we know what pleases God’ (Baruch 4:4).

3.203But the readers’ judgment will supply the task of denunciation; let us move on to the rest. Certainly among things there is no other evil that is truly evil except what we call sin.

3.204From this sin, you say, natural evil is born in each person. Therefore nothing is truly evil except evil desert.

3.205Mani calls nature evil for no other reason than that he considers it deserving of evil, and thinks punishments should be inflicted on it. You also affirm evil exists in human nature, and no different evil from Mani’s: fleshly desire, which you publicly proclaim was poured in by the devil. You say nature is so deserving of evil that you persist in sentencing it to eternal torments. Without doubt, then, you pronounce it utterly evil and condemned in exactly the same way as Mani.

3.206Let us see, then, how the second part of your statement returns to this point too. You said: ‘Whoever says human nature is not good denies a good Creator to the nature created; whoever denies it contains evil begrudges a merciful Savior to the nature corrupted’ (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.36). As you have been forced to profess, anyone denying that it is good also denies its good Creator, that is, God. And for nature to be evil means nothing other than to possess evil desert naturally. Thus even your confession supports our truth: you deny the good God as creator of humans, whose nature you swear is evil, appealing both to its vices and to its punishments.

3.207We therefore do not begrudge a Savior to the nature we defend on the grounds of its Creator’s dignity. We deny that it is evil, so as not to become Manichaeans; we deny that evil is in it, so as not to be the very same Manichaeans under changed names.

3.208We say that in each person already acting well or badly by personal choice, it is the person’s moral standing, not nature’s, that is corrupted. Accordingly we maintain that Christ’s grace heals what can be corrupted, since nothing is shown wounded except what is shown healed.

3.209In those baptized, what is removed is not fleshly desire, which is natural, but the guilt of evil desire.

3.210Consequently, the testimony of both the Creator and the Redeemer of the human race proves that no sin exists in nature.

3.211To repeat our conclusions: by the testimony of both God’s commands and his judgments, I have shown that the theory of inherited sin is hostile to God’s justice.

3.212By inserting Mani’s own writings, I have demonstrated that only a Manichaean accuses the fleshly desire God, the creator of bodies, implanted to bring the sexes together for reproduction.

3.213I have shown that you have no arguments for inherited sin except those supplied by Mani.

3.214Through examining your statement, I have exposed you as a denier of free will and of God as the creator of newborn children.

3.215By explaining the statement you promised to compress into one word, I have proved that you pronounce nature evil.

3.216I am therefore confident that even those slowest to understand, or deceived by favor toward you, can see clearly that you reject only Mani’s name. In everything you believe, along with all the followers of inherited sin, you cling to his doctrines, which are no less filthy than foolish.