To Florus 6.26

First, how insane is your very claim that childbirth pain accompanies sin! It so plainly concerns the condition of the sexes rather than punishment for crimes that all animals, stained by no sin, undergo these pangs and groans in giving birth. This shows that something found even without sin is not proof of sin.

Then you advance another, far more foolish claim. ‘A woman would not suffer pain,’ you say, ‘unless she shared in crimes.’ Yet immediately you add: ‘But this sin, for which the woman suffers, is found not in the mother but in the child being born.’ (1 Corinthians 11:3) Thus, you say, even baptized women live free from sin, yet are afflicted by the difficulties of their childbearing because of the iniquity of the children they bring forth. On this opinion, inherited sin no longer flows from mother to offspring but pours back from the newborn into the parents. If a baptized woman feels pain because iniquities are found in the infant, transmission begins to run uphill rather than downhill.

‘But she is not tormented because her son has iniquity; rather, because she herself brought it with her when she was born.’ Yet you said grace removed this evil from her. If a laboring woman’s pain adhered to sin, removing sin should have cured childbirth’s torment. Or, if this torment cannot exist without iniquity, but is still found in women after baptism, then grace has not removed their iniquity either, and baptism’s ceremony has become worthless.

But if these mysteries possessed the power and truth we believe in, not what you invent, and every sin was removed, yet the pain caused by difficult childbirth remains, it is clear that this groaning indicates nature, not fault. Even you agree it is suffered by women whom you acknowledge freed from the Manichaeans’ sin. So much is clear from examples alone. If we inspect the words of the pronouncement itself, however, it will dissolve your fog with brilliance surpassing the sun’s rays.

The woman was not told, ‘Pains will arise within you,’ or, ‘I will create groaning for you,’ as though these sensations were instituted after her fault. Rather: ‘I will greatly multiply your sorrows’ (Genesis 3:16). God shows that what he promises not to create but to multiply in the sinful person already exists in the natural order. Only existing things are multiplied. Before they exist, ‘making’ is the proper expression; calling it ‘increasing’ is premature.

Lest this seem our own point rather than truth’s, this same order of words is recorded concerning all living beings. Before humanity was made, God said: ‘Let us make humanity in our image and likeness’ (Genesis 1:26). Again concerning the woman: ‘God said: It is not good for the human to be alone; let us make him a helper like himself’ (Genesis 2:18). After they were made, however: ‘He blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply and fill the earth’ (Genesis 1:28). Before their creation he did not say ‘Let them multiply,’ but ‘Let humanity be made.’ Once someone existed who could increase, he appropriately added, ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth.’

In this same order, childbirth’s groaning, established naturally in human bodies as in animals, was not created in Eve but increased, so that she would suffer a special intensity of heightened pangs. Yet these would reach later women only in the ordinary natural measure, varying with their bodies. Thus sin did not cause the woman to suffer in childbirth, but to suffer excessively. Similarly, we read of bodily infirmities coming upon particular people for sins at different times; but such increased misery did not overturn the smaller natural measure.

Not everything in this pronouncement, however, is confined to punitive severity. One part indicates desert, another specifies a duty. ‘I will greatly multiply your sorrows and your groaning; in sorrow you shall bear children.’ Up to this point comes punishment, earned by the person, not by nature. From here the task of the sex created second is simply described: ‘Your turning shall be toward your husband, and he shall rule over you’ (Genesis 3:16). This plainly does not concern punishment: its absence would concern fault. A woman’s submission to her husband with modest affection belongs to order, not punishment. According to the apostle, ‘the husband is the woman’s head’ (Ephesians 5:23), because ‘man was not created for woman, but woman for man’ (1 Corinthians 11:9). If she reveres her head with fitting modesty, she maintains nature’s arrangements rather than enduring sin’s torments. If she resists that order, she is guilty. Performing something whose neglect is a fault is therefore no misery.