To Florus 4.38

These are foolish matters, which insult my pen more than they burden it. Yet they follow necessarily from your belief. Still, I again urge the reader to pay attention. You tried to assert that whatever is proved to be God’s work is not shameful. Though you could not establish that, you committed yourself most clearly to this: you would remove shame from lust if it were shown to be God’s work. I proved this so thoroughly in my first work that I do not think even you will doubt it once you read it. Nevertheless, since this invention of yours indicates that those books have not yet reached your hands, I will not shrink from demonstrating the same point here as well.

Who, then, do you think created the irrational animals? At certain seasons they are stirred by the most ardent lust, so that it even sharpens each species’ ferocity: “Then the boar is savage, then the tigress most cruel”; “Above all, the frenzy of mares is remarkable” (Virgil, Georgics 3.248, 266). In spring the grasses swell; in spring an abundance of tender moisture overflows; “And the herds seek mating on their appointed days” (compare Virgil, Georgics 2.324–331). It would take too long to go through them one by one. Every kind of creature—held aloft by flight, submerged by swimming, or scattered by wandering through air, sea, or woods, yet neither raised by reason nor lowered by guilt—is inflamed by the familiar pleasure of bodily union. Did they receive the sexual ardor they experience through God’s work or the devil’s? You will undoubtedly cry out: God’s. So God kindles sex with natural pleasure. Manichaeus, to be sure, denies this more consistently than you do.

For the man from whom you learned to condemn the desire of the flesh considered what he must say. He pursues wherever he can find it the thing he had defined as devilish and removed from God’s works. Thus, through desire he assigned human bodies to the devil as their author, and through human beings he assigned all living creatures to him. But you still remain in Manichaeus’s camp and carry his largest dragon standard, from which you breathe deadly poison into unhappy minds by teaching natural evil and the criminality of marriage. Yet you refuse to hurl the weapons your teacher supplied against all natures. Friendlier to the beasts—though you spare them only to accuse the condition of rational creatures with greater authority—you agree that God made in their bodies what the devil made in ours, although you admit that the same thing exists in human beings more mildly than in animals.

Let the thoughtful reader understand what has been established. You do not deny that God made bodily lust in animals. This feeling is therefore not unworthy of God’s works, since it is found more strongly in substances that have taken nothing of the devil’s evil, not even by the slightest act of will. Desire, then, is defended by the example of animals and by the dignity of its author. What God, the maker of bodies, made, and what a nature free of sin possesses, is neither evil nor devilish. Once this is clear, I ask whether you agree that God made the lust experienced by human bodies. If you agree, the dispute is over: you will be corrected and Manichaeus will remain crushed. But if you say, “It could not have been made by God in human bodies,” I reply that you consider this pleasure and desire of the flesh unworthy of human works, not God’s. There can be no doubt: if you acknowledge something was made by God somewhere, yet say it could not have been made in human beings, you are not taking away the testimony due to desire but seeking an undeserved distinction for the human body.

See, then, how profane your sect’s conclusion is. You call unworthy of mortal flesh what was not unworthy of the Creator’s work. By this reasoning you have not disparaged lust; you have exalted the human being you meant to accuse. Such is the consistency, and such the reward, of someone who declares war on truth: he is always struck by results opposite to his efforts. I will therefore now rise against you with a more consistent use of your own words, as every sensible person recognizes. Can it be that when God’s works are assessed and described, reason receives no hearing and the examples of all natures receive no consideration (compare Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.9.22)? Does human madness rise so high that a man thinks unsuitable for his own flesh what he sees flourishing through God’s work in creatures that share his nature? For the origin and constitution of our bodies are no different from those of these creatures.