To Florus — Book 6

6.1I do not doubt that until now our dispute has been regarded as concerning an obscure question rather than the heart of the faith. People living far from spiritual pursuits are moved only by passing breezes of rumor. Fearing the hostility of the times and lacking the protection of verified truth—as commonly happens amid alarm, when people trust no one less than themselves—they think the more crowded road the safer one.

6.2At present this happens for two reasons: the Manichaeans’ position has won approval in councils of wrongdoing, and the storms of persecution that have been stirred up frighten feeble spirits away from favoring truth.

6.3Thus one group caters both to pleasure and to fear. Its indulgence travels with the crowds of the arena, circus, or theater, seeking to excuse every disgrace by necessity, which always lightens the blame for what was done, and to avoid the world’s uproar by abandoning its principles. These are the things that win a larger following for the defense of vices. Yet most of that crowd, as I said before, believed that advocates of inherited sin and catholics agreed at least in their account of God.

6.4But both in the earlier dispute and in the present one, Augustine’s argument has made clear that the god of those who teach inherited sin is not the God whom Christians, with one voice, worship as just and as the creator of all things. I already anticipate in my mind that many even of those who fell through blind error will correct themselves once they recognize this.

6.5Against us, Mani believes mortals are driven by nature into shameful acts and crimes. He supposes the origin of darkness supplied the material both for bodies and for crimes; that sexual pleasure is the corruption of the human race, the vindication of the devil’s claim, and the force driving people into every dishonor. The advocate of inherited sin follows him in every way, as his heir and offspring, repeatedly proclaiming natural crimes, an eternal necessity of evil arising from dark nothingness, and an affection assigned to the senses that pollutes all the saints and places God’s image in the devil’s kingdom (Genesis 1:26–27).

6.6They now hurl their accusing weapons at God himself, reaching the same conclusion from different beginnings. Mani says: God is good and does no evil. But he adds that God consigns souls to eternal fire for natural faults—an act of obvious cruelty. Thus, at the end of his opinion, he stains with plain injustice the one he had called good.

Augustine, however, as though trusting the man he addresses as his patron, is bolder. He despises his teacher’s hesitation and does not hesitate to begin where Mani ended. He pronounces that God makes and creates evil—that is, sin. This plainly cannot fit the God worshiped by the catholic faith. Let this above all remain fixed in the reader’s mind: no believer has ever had a greater cause for struggle than ours, and anyone who considers nature itself a necessity for crime has no share in worshiping the Christians’ God. Since this has often been stressed—the usefulness of the central case required repetition—let us now examine the first humans, whose indictment the Numidian carries like a light shield when he meets our battle line.

6.7He presses into all his writings the claim that only Adam and Eve were made good by God—that is, subject to no natural guilt—and that they sinned by free will, but so greatly that they overthrew everything God had established in their nature. He says: ‘The devil planted that sin far greater and deeper than the sins familiar to people. Therefore, through that great sin of the first human, our nature was changed for the worse there, and not only became sinful but also generates sinners. Yet the very sickness through which the power of living well perished is not nature but a defect. That sin which changed the human being for the worse in paradise, because it is far greater than we can judge, is inherited by everyone born’ (compare Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.34.57–58).

See how openly he explained his meaning! Those first humans, he says, had a good nature, but committed a sin so monstrous and immeasurable that they destroyed the power to live well, extinguished the light of free will, and established a necessity of sinning thereafter. No one born from their stock could strive toward the beauty of virtues, turn away from vices, and attain holiness.

6.8He thinks, therefore, that praising those first humans—just two people—helps him maintain a distinction between Manichaeans and advocates of inherited sin. It is hard to encounter anything more outrageous or shameless than this opinion. Freedom of choice, he says, lost its strength once it began to exercise itself.

Let us turn to him and carefully investigate each point. You admit, do you not, that the first human was made with free will, created good by God, and polluted by no corruption of sin at the outset? Yet, though his original condition was innocent, he afterward transgressed voluntarily and imposed on everyone to be born from him an unavoidable compulsion to sin. This is certainly your doctrine, which we testify was drawn from Mani’s mud. For Mani also regards Adam’s own nature as naturally evil, although formed from the flower of the first substance and far better than those who followed.

6.9For the present, then, we must first expose the dullness of your thinking, and then show—as we have often done already—that you never step even one foot away from the Manichaeans’ hovels and brothels. To begin with, it is utterly mad to think an act of choice was mixed into reproductive seed and the operations of wills took root in conceptions. You abolish the clearest and widest distinction between natures and pursuits, and then say the first humans’ will reproduced itself in their descendants. Everything in existence struggles against this error.

Orators’ sons never brought the elegance of their fathers’ art into their infant cries; actors’ offspring did not stretch their hands in trained gestures to accompany words; warriors’ sons did not demand a trumpet from the crowd. We may pursue examples of every kind on this pattern, all sounding together more clearly than thunder. The whole of things answers that nature has one set of boundaries, will another, and the conditions of reproductive seed cannot be penetrated by the desires of chosen pursuits. It has therefore proved a belief of the dullest, most abject stupidity to think that something admittedly voluntary was transformed into nature.

But your other claim is far, far more disgraceful: you say the capacity to act was consumed when action began. Free will is simply the capacity to sin and not to sin, subject to no compulsion on either side, but able by its own choice to stand on whichever side it wants. Yet you say that once it began to will one side, it lost the ability to choose either.

6.10Now let us prove what we said: your doctrine differs in no respect from the Manichaeans’. There is no doubt at all that Adam’s own nature was made utterly evil if it was formed with this condition: a necessity of evil but no necessity of good. A crime, even if conceived by will, would become natural in a nature in which goodness would not become natural. Such a person is falsely said to have sinned voluntarily, since he labored under the prior disadvantage of a thoroughly evil condition. How bound to evil he was is obvious, if he was destined to be filled with inseparable guilt.

What worse substance could I find than one made so that it could fall into injustice but could not leave injustice? If it had suffered this compulsion on goodness’s side, even losing free will, it would still have brought no accusation against its author: no one would challenge him over an abundance of kindness. But when such domination is placed on evil’s side, it accuses no one more than humanity’s maker himself. Flattery from his own accusers—that is, from you—uselessly strokes a god proved the closest friend of wickedness by the ugliness of what he created.

Who can be persuaded that he did not destine the first human for crimes if he deprived him of the capacity for reform; if he gave him so twisted a mind that his own error could not displease him, leaving no return to honor and no improvement through experience; if, to prevent him ever feeling a desire to recover uprightness, he tore out the very possibility of correction? If his condition was such that a single fall cost him the power to reform for as long as he lived, he was plainly established for no other purpose than to fall. Indeed, it is more accurate to say he always lay fallen than that he fell, if he is not allowed to rise in respect of conduct.

What sort of freedom, then, was supposedly bestowed on him at first, if among two contrary qualities he received the worse as necessary and the better as changeable—indeed, if, occupied by the tyranny of guilt, he was stripped of the capacity to come to his senses? The first human’s condition was therefore utterly repulsive from the outset, if God established it so unhappily that his coming fall into crime bound him to perpetual necessity of sinning.

6.11The alliance between you and the Manichaeans plainly endures: they by open profession and you by argument maintain that even the first human’s nature was evil. All this is full of absurdities and lies. Passing over the legions of saints, let us take the first example of righteousness after Adam’s sin: Abel’s wonderful holiness proves it. Born from sinners, he showed through the actual exercise of virtue that he did not lack the power to live well (Genesis 4:4; Hebrews 11:4). Yet, leaving these examples aside, it is useful to press the pronouncements of the party teaching inherited sin.

What do you suppose the free will you acknowledge was given to the first humans was like? Surely it meant they could change their minds: do evil or withdraw from evil, abandon or keep justice. There would therefore have been no will to sin unless the capacity to will came first. You say that after they began using their own will—that is, a movement of mind compelled by no one—they lost free will. What could be imagined more insane?

To state your argument’s force precisely: you say that what was given only for the sake of willing perished because of willing. Sin is simply an evil will. Freedom was given solely to permit the will to arise, not to compel it. Yet you say this freedom lost its condition through an act of will, so it is believed to have died through the very thing that alone proves it alive. An evil will is therefore not freedom’s fruit, but evidence of freedom. Freedom is simply the capacity for good and evil, provided they are voluntary. How, then, could it perish through the very thing for which it is shown to have been instituted, when an evil will and a good will are not freedom’s destruction but its witnesses?

The distance between proper functions and destructive crises is therefore the distance between your opinion and the meaning of free will, whose destruction you think was supplied by its own grounds for praise. What new or unforeseen thing happened when humanity sinned, to overthrow God’s arrangements? A being was made who could sin and not sin. When he sinned, he did what he ought not to have done, but what he nevertheless could do. How, then, would he lose that capacity, instituted precisely so that he could will something and could refuse what he willed (Genesis 4:4) (Hebrews 11:4)?

6.12Next, to follow the precipices of your opinion, you argue that free will was arranged on this condition: it would lose its power as the consequence of the will that followed, and thereafter endure the necessity of the quality it chose. Attend, then, to our reply. Do you think humanity was created to suffer this necessity of the chosen quality on both sides? If someone willed good, could he thereafter not sin; and if he chose evil, could he no longer reform? Or would necessity of evil follow only the evil choice, while nothing similar happened on the good side, which would always remain exposed to the dangers of change?

Take whichever of these alternatives you please. If you say nature was made to suffer only the necessity of evil, no one will doubt that a nature assigned compulsion solely toward the worse side is being defined as utterly repulsive. Adam too is proved to have possessed an evil nature, and no shadow of a voluntary offense will remain for you to hide beneath.

But if you profess that the same consequence would have followed on goodness’s side—if he had willed good he could no longer sin—I reply: Why, then, did he sin? Why did no necessity of good make him impervious to the devil’s plots, when he is found to have obeyed God for some time before sinning? The instant the clay grew warm with the soul’s entrance, he did not immediately blaze into the desire of an evil will. Rather, we read that he was placed in paradise to cultivate and guard it and received God’s command to eat all its fruits but obediently abstain from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Before his wife’s body was formed from his side, he therefore remained obedient to the command, an innocent cultivator of that delightful countryside. Afterward he received the help of a companion like himself. Scripture’s truthful account emphasizes these distinctions of time. Once he saw the woman prepared for him, he served God’s command with such diligent devotion that he also informed her of the law he had received. Thus he not only kept but also proclaimed the divine command, teaching Eve reverence for the one commanding, the kind of obedience required, and the reason for fear.

That is why the woman, to whom God had given no command, resisted the devil’s approach attentively. At first she refuted the serpent’s lies. She said abstinence from all trees had not been commanded, as he invented; rather, permission to enjoy all their fruit came with a warning about just one little tree, and the fear of death was set before them as the rightful consequence for transgressors. It therefore appears that Adam kept the command for no short time. Eve too cared about devotion, although she fell through love of knowledge and divinity.

Why, then, did the justice and devotion that flourished a long time in Adam and for some time in Eve not remove their ability to do wrong, so that a necessity of good made them impervious to guilty persuasions? They were obedient for as long as they wished, yet the merit of their devotion did not cost them their ability to transgress: in the end they fell (Genesis 2–3). Therefore, even after sinning, it is clear that they could not have lost the power to reform. Here, as everywhere, you have lost everything you invented. That sin of the first humans neither created necessity for any crimes nor passed into nature, just as their previous justice neither imposed necessity for virtues nor claimed the pathways of reproductive seed (Genesis 2:7) (Genesis 2:15–17) (Genesis 2:18–23) (Genesis 3:1–6).

6.13What, then, has been established? One of two alternatives is necessary. Either you acknowledge that Adam was made with a good substance, that his nature was not destroyed by a voluntary quality, and you abandon natural sin; or, if you insist as before that he is the cause of natural evils, you must pronounce him too to be of an utterly evil substance and to belong to your god—that is, yours and Mani’s.

6.14So far I have argued as the practice of our faith required. But I will not be content with this approach alone. I shall deal generously with you and deliberately take on a role that seems to favor your teacher’s position. The purpose is to force you to attack Mani, if you disagree with him. The absence of trickery in our argument will be shown by the very fact that the advocate of inherited sin can find no way to oppose Mani. Thus the extent of your conspiracy and the mutual advantages by which you manage everything will appear when no quarrel can be stirred up between you. Let the reader keep in mind the purpose I have explained for taking this course. Now let us speak in the role we assume.

[Julian argues in an assumed Manichaean voice:] ‘Those who think this bodily formation capable of justice are completely mistaken. The lowly nature of flesh and blood opposes every good pursuit. Every stimulus, through the seduction of the senses, slides into disturbing—indeed overthrowing—the mind. Cast into this mire by some unknown misfortune, the mind loses its noble flashes of light through mixture with clay. Of itself it strives toward its own place, toward the heights, but it is crushed in an earthly prison. When it wishes to fly upward to chastity, it encounters the glue and birdlime of obscene pleasure rising from burning inward parts.

‘If it desires generous liberality, it is bound in the tightest shackles of greed, disguised as thrift. If it wishes to stand in a balanced serenity of steadfastness, it is immediately overwhelmed by a hailstorm of fear and tempests of pain. Turning bloodless before every uncertainty, it cannot remain master of its own judgment. Add the night of ignorance, whose filth surrounds it. What praiseworthy quality shall we suppose in a living being that has neither keen eyes to choose useful things nor the ability to count its shipwrecks among the storms of desires and dangers?

‘Let no one falsely claim these things happened to a substance voluntarily corrupted. The original making of the first humans is found subject to these miseries. To prove this even from Moses, whom catholics revere: the first humans experienced fear’ (Genesis 2:17)s torture, terrified by the threat of danger unless they obeyed. So far as comparison allows us to judge, we think them more fearful than their descendants, since a punishment as yet experienced by no one tormented them. Why should the threat of death shake people who did not know what harm death would bring? Mere suspicions of evils plainly troubled them. In what tranquility could a mind stand when such a bitter winter of fear disturbed it?

‘And how profound its ignorance, how harsh the condition of enduring it, when it could be freed only by transgression! It would obtain knowledge of good and evil only through an act of condemnable daring. This living being, already so blind and miserable, was made restless too by inborn desire, provoked by the beauty and sweetness of the forbidden thing. As though all this were too little to express its unhappiness, it was exposed to attack by a higher nature. Who, then, could be foolish enough to suppose any good existed where he acknowledges so many instruments of misery were established?

‘This flesh, then, of the worst condition and worst nature, displayed in those first humans what it had possessed from the beginning. The good God could not have made so evil a substance. What remains except to acknowledge one giver of the soul and another creator of creatures of clay?’ (Genesis 3:6)

Mani’s battle line, whose role I had adopted, now stands in formation. You understand what we await: whoever opposes him must demonstrate it through a consistent attack. Let your doctrine fight him, then; it will appear whether it can make even a slight movement without destroying itself. He has certainly pronounced not only that everyone born from bodily union is criminal, but that Adam himself brought the necessity of faults from the formation of his inward parts and from the dirt of the clay from which he was made. He says: ‘Flesh’s nature was harmful in the first humans. It shut in, drenched, and extinguished the very spark of mind that glimmered with the pursuit of honor. Catholics are utterly foolish: they resist sinners’ testimony and will not accept even their own evidence. They see themselves not doing the good they want but performing the evil they detest (Romans 7:19), yet think there is no necessity of evil in the flesh.’

Let the advocate of inherited sin meet these highly prejudicial claims, if he can. For now I stand as a spectator and await the outcome of your conflict. What will you answer someone swearing that nature was evil even in the first humans? Undoubtedly you will reply that God, humanity’s maker, could not create evil in what he made. Therefore, since God, who does no evil, made humans, they cannot be proved naturally evil. You have said something, and truly. But consider whether you should have said it within my hearing. I care little how forcefully you shook Mani; meanwhile you have passed entirely into my jurisdiction.

Now that you are captured, I enjoy teasing you. I greet your profession with great applause and remind you to remember it. From the dignity of its author—that is, God, who does no evil—you pronounced that his works must be affirmed good. Do you think, then, that all humans generated by the sexual union God established are made by God or by the devil? If by God, how dare you pronounce them guilty and evil, when you said the decisive proof that Adam could not have been made with an evil nature was that he was created by God, who is perfectly good?

If this is a strong argument for believing the first humans’ substance was not established guilty—precisely that God, whom we acknowledge good, created it—then the same argument remains to destroy inherited sin. It proves that everyone born from marriage cannot be created unjust, because God, whom we acknowledge good, creates them. But if, even after this, raging shamelessness persists in swearing both that infants are made by God and that they are naturally evil, these lies bring no prejudice against a catholic or our God. Yet plainly you have not attacked Mani. He gladly embraces your accusation against God, content that you have lost the argument through which you tried to establish Adam’s good condition (Genesis 2:7) (Genesis 3:5).

6.15But let us not press the first part of the contest too hard. Let us allow you to proceed in your opinion and prove Adam’s nature good. You surely say: A just God would not impose a law of devotion on a human being if he knew that person suffered a necessity of sinning. If he demanded justice of will from someone he knew to possess an evil nature, he would not prove the transgressor guilty, but publicly show himself an enemy of justice. Yet the just God imposed a law on humanity and promised punishment for transgression. It is therefore established that the human being, good by nature, could sin only by will alone.

You see how sound a conclusion I have offered in your name? It is precisely the sword that flashes in catholic hands and lays waste both Manichaeans and advocates of inherited sin. But I too quickly brought in your party’s name, though for now I wanted my reply taken as yours. The solid response has therefore shaken Mani. I accompany this august reasoning with fitting praise, but notice that the oil of this praise sharpens the sword against you.

Repeat, please, what you said. ‘The just God would not impose a law on humanity if it were evil by nature. But he, being just, imposed a law. It is now clear that humanity could keep what the perfectly fair God commanded, because without the power to obey, the one commanding could never have a reasonable basis for his order.’ What a delightful little argument! Before me, with me as spectator, he establishes the goodness of the nature receiving law from the justice of the lawgiver—and does not see that before Mani feels even a small wound, he has brought destruction upon the advocates of inherited sin.

To make you understand that I seize your bloody weapons while you lie half-dead, and that your dying eyes must bear the sight of victorious truth, I will drive you onto your own weapons. [Literary echo: Virgil, Aeneid 10.462–463.] If the just God could not give Adam a law unless he knew him free to observe justice without any compulsion toward evil, then without doubt the law of later times, carrying the same weight of justice, could not have been given to people if they were born from the womb either weak for good and incapable of justice, or guilty—that is, evil. That later law was also put in writing, more extensive through multiplied provisions, more precise through distinctions, and more fearsome through increased punishment.

For just as the plea of necessity would excuse these people in every transgression, the excessive commands, uncontrolled decrees, and unjust judgments would return as a stain upon their author. Thus this second part closes in the same way as the first. Either you acknowledge that God’s justice could command only what he judged those subject to him could do—in which case the first command destroys Mani, while the later laws destroy Mani and the advocate of inherited sin together—or, if impiety abandons this argument, Mani has not suffered even a slight blow from you. With the world as witness, he will show that he is your father and leader, and that he and you have one single contest against us.

6.16I do not know whether, now driven by lack of resources, you might attempt something so foolish and weak as saying you cannot prove by any reasons that God created Adam good, but are satisfied to believe it solely on the authority of the reading. After humanity was formed on the sixth day, it says of all creatures together: ‘God saw everything he had made, and behold, it was very good’ (Genesis 1:31). You would thus judge Adam to have been established without injustice, not because of the maker’s dignity or a weighing of his justice, but because of the testimony calling all created things well made.

Yet although this strikes Mani so lightly that he laughs, it exposes the advocate of inherited sin bound before us. We need gather no crowd of divine testimonies here. The apostle’s authority alone supplies our ruling: foreseeing this foul error, he thundered against you in lofty speech, ‘Every creature of God is good’ (1 Timothy 4:4).

If Moses’ statement that God made everything well suffices to prove the first human was formed with a good nature, and you therefore insist Adam could not have been created by God with sin because he is read to have been made good among the rest, we will answer along exactly the same lines: no one can be born with sin, because the apostle defends every creature of God as good.

What have these arguments accomplished? The choice offered you in the contest declared between you and Mani has publicly revealed what reason discovered. Once the contest was proposed, you could not hurl even one weapon at your teacher without destroying yourself. Thus it shines still more clearly that you and the Manichaeans have fused through obscene agreement into a single body of impiety. What could be more closely joined than what not even the arrival of danger can separate? In every destruction of Mani, the doctrine of inherited sin dies with him. Nothing strikes him and leaves you intact. Your principles, mysteries, and dangers are one—and you resent being called old Mani’s offspring?

6.17See, by contrast, how real our struggle is against you and Mani, whose downfall always entangles you, and how swift our triumph over him. We immediately draw the plow of our first definition around everything he vomited out to defame God’s work. We force him to explain what he thinks sin is. It plainly is nothing other than a will seeking what justice forbids and from which it is free to abstain. Once this is established, all the thornbushes of objection that pricked bodily existence are, as the writer says, shown torn out by the roots. [Literary echo: Cicero, On Ends, Book 2.]

As for the feeling of fear and the sensation of pain, through which he thought a storm arose to shipwreck humans, they are shown not merely to compel no evil, but, when checked by a good will, to assist and carry forward justice. Who would fear judgment without fear’s warning? Who would benefit from repentant groans without the cleansing of pain and inward distress? Finally, what power would a judge’s severity have unless it punished voluntary sins by the suffering of inflicted torment?

All these things testify that sin is nothing other than a free will despising justice’s commands. Justice can stand only by reckoning as sin what it knows could freely have been avoided. Consequently, no law can count natural things as faults, and no one takes on guilt for a crime he did not himself commit while able to avoid it. This argument’s power destroys both Mani and the advocate of inherited sin, who, with all the eyes of understanding gouged out, tries to attach an act of will to reproductive seed.

6.18But by the faithfulness of our God and of humanity! Could such monstrous inventions really have been devised, deliberately and laboriously trying to assert everything upside down? What could be more monstrous than what the Carthaginian says? Things that were natural, he says, did not endure; things adopted by choice adhered to the first formation of the bodily members.

Adam, he says, was made good and possessed natural innocence. Raised above other creatures by a special nobility, he shone with his Creator’s likeness (Genesis 1:26–27). He received free will in his created condition, to move by his own judgment in whatever direction he wished. Through the very condition of his making, which set him above the rest, he obtained the ability to approach either good or evil and withdraw from either. But because he used his independent judgment to adopt a corrupt inclination of the free mind, he overthrew all those admittedly inborn things; only sin and the necessity of sinning clung to him inseparably.

This is what I called a monstrous invention. It is an unheard-of disgrace to say: A living being was well made in whom even natural goods could be lost, while even voluntary evils clung inseparably.

6.19Someone may say here: What then? Do you deny that the innocence in which he was created was corrupted by committing a voluntary sin? Even if committing injustice does not destroy the possibility of returning to good, it is still certain that the standing of innocence with which human life begins perishes through a fault of will. I do not deny that this is so. But what I want these examples to illuminate is this: the qualities by which we are called good and evil were made to operate under the will’s authority. This was established so firmly that even innocence, which precedes the will’s activity because of the author’s dignity and is natural, has no power to preserve itself in a resisting mind. Therefore this principle must apply far, far more strongly on evil’s side: a fault adopted voluntarily must acquire no tyranny that destroys reason.

If the good quality with which humanity was made was not unchangeable—for someone unable to vary his own movements would falsely be called free—much less could an evil quality become unchangeable in a rational being. Otherwise the principle of freedom would suffer from evil’s side a restriction that, to preserve its condition, it had not suffered even from goodness’s side.

6.20What parasite ever flattered a boastful soldier’s strength as the advocate of inherited sin flatters the devil’s? This can be recognized by weighing their respective influences. God made the human being, handling the very material of clay with an awe-inspiring condescension, as it followed its author’s hand into human shape. The completed image stood there, still pale and cold, awaiting the breath through which it would shine and live. Then the soul, created and breathed in by the author’s most august breath, stirred the inward parts it filled. Every sense awakened to prepare for its own tasks. The entering inhabitant gave color to the inward parts, warmth to the blood, vigor to the limbs, brightness to the skin. See the work divine goodness undertook in forming and animating humanity (Genesis 2:7)!

Yet the Creator’s closeness did not abandon him once complete. He was transferred to a more delightful place; the one God had mercifully made he generously enriched. Nor, content with this, did God stop there: he enlightened him by sharing conversation. He gave him a command so that, understanding his freedom, he might see the means at hand to become closer to his Creator. The command was not stretched into many provisions, lest a multiplied law impose a burden. The prohibition of one small fruit sought evidence of devotion. Later, so that he might have a companion through whom to become a father, he was ennobled again by the touch of the hand that made him. Divine conversation continued to cherish and honor him (Genesis 2:8–25).

These divine provisions—so prolonged, so many, so great: arrangements, gifts, commands, conversations—created no necessity of good in humanity. On the other side, however, the devil, as timid as he was crafty, exchanged a few words with the woman. Those words are said to have had such power that they immediately became a natural condition—indeed, overthrew every inborn thing, created perpetual necessity of evil, and imposed the devil as lord and possessor over God’s image.

What, then, is stronger, more excellent, more magnificent than the hostile power, if with a slight conversation it accomplished what God could obtain neither by his works nor by his gifts? Plainly you stand on the side of the one whose power you proclaim so excessively. You have no share in worshiping our God, whom we acknowledge as both perfectly fair and all-powerful: ‘He is mighty, and truth surrounds him’ (Genesis 3:1–6); he humbles the proud one as a wounded man—that is, the devil and Mani, and you their followers, who slander nature to avoid admitting that you sin voluntarily. Our God, then, ‘scatters his enemies by the strength of his arm’ (Psalm 89:8, 10; LXX/Vulgate Psalm 88:9, 11) (Genesis 1:26–27). Thus neither you nor the Manichaeans could bring forward anything that the thunderbolt of his truth did not shatter (Psalm 89:8, 10).

6.21It is therefore perfectly clear that Augustine differs in nothing from his teacher. His arguments define Adam’s nature as utterly evil no less than everyone else’s. To discuss further with him what we have treated, it appears that you do not even consider the first sin the same kind as other faults. You say later ages’ crimes cannot pass into nature—for example, that children born from an embezzler, a parent-murderer, or an incestuous person are not born liable for their parents’ sins—and that no crime except that one is mixed into reproductive seed. You therefore show with complete openness that you do not consider that disobedience of the same kind as the rest.

See how brief and clear our question is. If Adam’s sin was adopted voluntarily and could become natural, why are the sins committed every day by a criminal will not piled into the deformity and prejudicial condition of reproductive seed? If these sins, no less atrocious and more numerous, cannot be implanted at birth, by what law, condition, or special privilege is that one alone claimed to be inborn? If the sins we know, which law condemns and fairness punishes, are of the same kind as the first human’s sin, committed voluntarily and punished justly, why do we not understand these from that one, or that one from these? If they cannot testify to one another, how can anyone shamelessly deny that the first transgression was of another condition—produced not by will but by natural corruption?

Finally, while maintaining inherited sin, dare to define any sin. I do not mean the first; for now take one committed today—sacrilege, a shameful act, or some evil crime. Explain the definition of these sins. You will undoubtedly say: It is a will seeking what justice forbids and from which it is free to abstain; if there were no evil will, there could be no sin. Observe how reasonably we rise against this. What dullness, what intolerable shamelessness! You define sin as nothing but a free will forbidden by justice, while the theory of natural evil lays down that there is an involuntary sin with which a human is born. Then it is not true that only what is freely committed is a fault, since there is a crime—and the greatest one—received not voluntarily but by birth.

Give back, then, the definition of sin that is friendly to catholics and does not turn aside to lodge with you even as a guest. Having relinquished it, prove that you are not a fellow soldier of those who attack substance itself with the stigma of wickedness. To gather our conclusions: either no sin will be shown voluntary if any sin is natural, or none will be natural if every sin is defined as voluntary. Consequently, either deny that sin can be born and come over to catholic faith, or, if you persist that not merely some sin but the greatest crime is received through nature without will, give your name too to Mani, whom you obey in everything.

6.22Time urges us to move on, but indignation forces me to linger here a little. Do you dare say Adam sinned voluntarily? Where did this dream come from? ‘Because,’ you say, ‘it would have been unjust for God to count something as sin unless he knew the person was free to abstain.’ What then? Did the prince of darkness whom you worship lend him this justice for a moment, then soon demand it back and strip this god of all fairness? At the beginning he understood that nothing should be counted as sin except what could freely be avoided; afterward, through all remaining time, he knew that every newborn lacked freedom to abstain.

Finally, how do you know that the only just course in Adam’s case was to punish voluntary guilt, unless you know it unjust to charge anyone with a crime admittedly received without will? Either you will consider inherited sin just, so that it can fit God’s judgment when he charges an infant with a sin committed without any will of the infant. Then you will be forced to profess it equally just and fitting for God’s judgments to have charged Adam with a sin he knew arose not from Adam’s will but from the deformity of his substance. In that case there will be no transmission of sin: the nature condemned will not have been corrupted by its agent’s choice, but badly established from the beginning, and you will confess yourself a Manichaean.

Or, coming to your senses, you will say it would be unjust to hold Adam guilty for his nature’s faults. Then it follows irrefutably that it would be utterly wicked to judge Abel, Enoch, Noah, and the whole human race liable for original guilt. If you attach this crime of judgment to your god, he alone will remain guilty in place of everyone. It will appear, as always, that he is not the God whom we catholics worship as perfectly just in the Trinity. But if you stop accusing God, you will condemn the doctrine of Manichaean inherited sin that has pierced you until now, as though returning to life.

6.23‘That sin which changed the human being for the worse in paradise, because it is far greater than we can judge, is inherited by everyone born’ (Hebrews 13:4) (Augustine, Marriage and Sexual Desire 2.34.58). Who told you Adam’s sin was far greater than Cain’s? Far greater than the Sodomites’? Far more monstrous, finally, than yours and Mani’s? Certainly the history supplies no occasion for this empty claim. He had been commanded to abstain from eating the fruit of one tree. Inexperienced, unskilled, unwary, without experience of fear or an example of justice, at the woman’s suggestion he took food whose sweetness and beauty had enticed him (Genesis 3:6). Recognize here a transgression of a command.

A transgression was committed, one among the rest that sinners’ pursuits have perpetrated at different times. It was no greater than when the people of Israel ate forbidden animals (compare Leviticus 11). The cause of sin lay not in the fruit’s quality but in violating the command. What, then, did Adam do to justify your accusation that his sin exceeded human estimation? Unless perhaps, following Mani’s mysteries—he keeps his hands from plucking fruits and growing things, lest he tear a part of his god that he imagines enclosed in bark and plants—you too think Adam sinned gravely because by eating the fruit he tore your god’s substance. What madness!

‘Because that sin is far greater than we can judge,’ he says, ‘it is inherited by everyone born.’ So eating forbidden fruit was a greater crime than stabbing holy Abel out of murderous envy (Genesis 4:8); than violating the rights of guests and the order of the sexes in Sodom (Genesis 19:4–9); than sacrificing one’s children to demons even under the law (Psalm 106:37); than subjecting innocent children, aware of no exercise of will and newly made by God, to the devil’s kingdom and joining them to his deserts; than accusing God of injustice; than assigning honorable marriage to the prince of darkness; finally, than to regard infants as worse than all the ungodly, worse than all pirates, because they are born through their parents’ sexual pleasure?

I do not invent this; I draw the conclusion. You called that sin greater and weightier than all crimes, such that no guilt could equal it. And you assert that infants arrive full of this great evil, which outweighs all vices. We have therefore understood correctly: the greater the sin they share, the more they take precedence in condemnation over all criminals.

6.24But why should hostility toward innocence arouse indignation against you, when the insolence and fury of your obscene mouth are not restrained even by reverence for divinity? You accuse infants, but God with them; you attack innocence, but also wrong fairness; you deny truth, but accuse the one you acknowledge as your god. Consequently, although we would not lack the help of reason, the transmission of sin would collapse more than sufficiently through its advocates’ deformity.

6.25But why do we stubbornly think only truth’s reasoning should be followed, when our enemies’ battle line relies on the very dangers of life and rises against us fortified by miseries’ support? It wants to prove the transmission of faults and punishments into reproductive seed through the shame of intercourse, the pain of childbirth, and the sweat of labor. These signs—difficult births, sweating farmers, and thorny fields—are meant to make us believe in a natural crime for which the human race is exercised by so many troubles. Some think Adam’s sin made the race mortal.

I said ‘some’ because their leader Augustine was ashamed to say this. Writing to Marcellinus, he says Adam appears to have been made mortal. Yet with his usual elegance he adds that death was the wages of iniquity (compare Romans 6:23), and pronounces that the one he admits was established mortal according to nature could not have died. Those pronouncements in Genesis which afflict Adam and Eve are therefore commonly brought against us. It is now time to discuss them.

‘The Lord God said to the serpent: Because you have done this, you are cursed beyond all cattle and all beasts upon the earth (Genesis 3:14). You shall go upon your breast and belly and eat earth all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed. She shall watch for your head, and you shall watch for her heel.

‘To the woman he said: I will greatly multiply your sorrows and your groaning (Genesis 3:16). In sorrow you shall bear children; your turning shall be toward your husband, and he shall rule over you.

‘To Adam he said: Because you listened to your wife’ (Romans 6:23)s voice and ate from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat from that one alone, the earth is cursed in your works. In sorrow you shall eat from it all the days of your life. It shall produce thorns and thistles for you, and you shall eat the grass of your field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread until you return to the earth from which you were taken, because you are earth, and into earth you shall go’ (Genesis 3:14–19).

You take these pronouncements as evidence of inborn iniquity and proclaim that women would not have suffered pain in childbirth unless the misery of Eve’s childbearing had passed to them along with her sin. You want the punishment itself to prove sin, so that what the first woman earned through her offense cannot be felt by any woman without the same iniquity. ‘There would be no pain in the woman giving birth,’ you say, ‘unless there were sin in the child being born.’

I can scarcely measure how astonished I am in meeting these claims. Your opinion has supplied so many irritations here that I can scarcely bring myself to contest it. These objections contain more sins against understanding than syllables.

6.26First, 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.

6.27Enough about the woman; let us pass to the man’s tasks. ‘To Adam he said: The earth is cursed in your works. In sorrow you shall eat from it all the days of your life. It shall produce thorns and thistles for you, and you shall eat the grass of your field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread until you return to the earth from which you were taken, because you are earth, and into earth you shall go’ (Genesis 3:17–19) (Genesis 4:7). Here he did not say, ‘I will multiply your thorns or your sweat’ (Genesis 1:11–12); they are spoken of as though first created then. Yet this objection is removed with no greater effort than in his wife’s case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet the guilty mind’s audacity did not escape God’s anger. Cain was questioned about his brother, convicted of his crime, and sentenced to punishment. Besides the terror laid upon him as the mark of his cruelty, he was punished by a curse from the earth: ‘You are cursed from the earth, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand (Genesis 4:11). When you work the earth, it shall no longer give you its strength’ (Genesis 4:3–12). See, once again the earth’s barrenness is decreed as the cultivator’s punishment. Countless kinds of torments are also threatened in Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 28:15–68).

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

6.28What, finally, will be said about the serpent itself? Do you think that curse punished the devil or this ordinary crawling animal? The pronouncement says to the serpent: ‘You are cursed beyond all cattle and all beasts upon the earth. You shall go upon your breast and belly and eat earth all the days of your life’ (Genesis 3:14). Do you think it was fulfilled in the devil’s punishment, or in the beast that spring warmth draws out of its holes?

If in this serpent, whose form stretches into a body without joints, and if you say that fault’s desert made it an earth-eater, then inherited iniquity burdens all beasts too. You think such transmission can occur only through the desire of those coupling. It follows that you must assert the devil planted the desire of serpents and hence of irrational animals. With your position exposed, you will blare Mani’s tune at us.

But if you acknowledge that everything said to the serpent was fulfilled spiritually in the devil, you will undoubtedly agree that the punishment spoken there neither proves present-day serpents guilty nor means the devil bodily eats earth. Even if he then enlisted the serpent’s service, and fatherly severity afterward broke it like the weapon he had used to wound humanity, sin still remained solely in the agent’s will.

Foods, thorns, and sweat were first established naturally, afterward increased judicially in certain cases, and have reached our own age [without that sin itself being passed on]. These matters are so plain that they require no lengthy defense.

6.29Yet lest we seem to have passed anything over carelessly, consider another point. Childbirth pain is known to vary with mothers’ bodies and strength. Women among foreign peoples and shepherds, hardened by exertion, give birth during journeys with such ease that they tend and immediately carry their offspring without interrupting the labor of travel. Not exhausted by childbirth’s difficulty, they transfer the womb’s burden to their shoulders. Generally, poor women’s lack of resources requires no midwives’ services. By contrast, wealthy women are softened by luxury: the more attendants each has, the more she learns and desires to be ill, and she thinks she needs as many services as she has available.

The hands of wealthy husbands certainly never experience the first human’s misery among thorns. Confident in their resources and placed beyond fear even of hunger by extensive estates, they consider it beneath them to spend a moment wishing for fertility. Sometimes, as the poet says, they order: ‘Unyoke the oxen, provided you send truffles’ (Genesis 3:16–19) (Juvenal, Satires 5.119).

If, then, women’s childbirth pain belongs to nature’s arrangements, as shown both by irrational animals’ example and the precise divine pronouncement; if withholding of fruit and the rise of thorns were created among other things but made denser and more troublesome for particular people; if childbirth’s difficulty and soil’s thorniness vary with bodies and regions; if the former pang continues in women’s inward parts after grace, while wealthy luxury knows nothing of the latter; and if the reason bodily dissolution would follow was expressly stated and attached to the manner of making rather than to errors—then here too everything plainly agrees with catholic truth. Neither women nor thorns help you at all.

6.30I certainly will not attack those who think Adam, had he obeyed, could have been transferred to immortality as a reward. We read that Enoch and Elijah were taken away so as not to see death (Genesis 5:24; Hebrews 11:5; 2 Kings 2:11). But nature’s arrangements are one thing, rewards for obedience another. One person’s merit is not so great as to overturn everything established naturally. Inborn mortality would therefore have continued operating in the rest, even if that first human had passed from prolonged life to eternity.

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

Christ’s authority also confirmed this settled matter. The Sadducees put a question to him using a woman married seven times, asking which husband would chiefly claim her if bodily resurrection were believed. He answered: ‘You are mistaken, knowing neither the Scriptures nor God’ (Genesis 5:24)s power. In the resurrection they neither marry nor take wives, for they will not die’ (Matthew 22:29–30; Luke 20:35–36). Knowing his own work, he explained why he had instituted marriage: reproduction would make up death’s losses. Generous fertility would cease at once when grasping death ceased.

If, then, Christ who created it testifies that fertility was made to contend with frailty, and marriage’s condition was arranged before sin, mortality too plainly belongs not to transgression but to nature, to which we read marriage also belongs. The law promulgated—‘On the day you eat what is forbidden, you shall surely die’ (Genesis 2:17) (Hebrews 11:5)—therefore means penal death, not bodily death. It threatens sins, not reproductive seed; only transgression incurs it, and only reform escapes it.

Its being said to fall on the day of sin follows Scripture’s practice of calling condemned someone still to be condemned. Thus the Lord says in the Gospel: ‘Everyone who has not believed in me is already judged, because he has not believed in the name of God’ (2 Kings 2:11)s only-begotten Son’ (John 3:18). This does not mean that unbelief denying Christ was already joined to eternal punishment before the time of judgment, since everyone who comes to faith was formerly an unbeliever. Rather, to display the lawgiver’s judgment, sins are spoken of as already punishments. Finally, both the book called Wisdom and many people’s opinion affirm that Adam himself was cleansed through subsequent reform (Wisdom 10:1–2).

6.31Enough now about Genesis. Let us turn to the apostle Paul, whom Mani and the advocate of inherited sin think supports their opinion. Discussing the resurrection of the dead, he says: ‘As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ’ (1 Corinthians 15:22) (Psalm 116:15). You, with whom we have our dispute, appropriated this testimony. But because you did not say what you thought it established, I can scarcely confirm it, though I suspect it.

What does it have to do with transmission of sin if everyone is said to die in Adam, when Adam is a human being’s name, while transmission denotes sin and Manichaean corruption? Unless perhaps you acknowledge Adam himself to be and to mean nothing other than sin, so that by this name the apostle seems to have pronounced that everyone dies in sin? But this is obviously insane.

What is strange, then, if, since the Hebrew word Adam means nothing other than ‘human’—as its translation expresses—the apostle said, ‘All die in Adam, and all will be made alive in Christ’: those who die according to human nature are raised from the dead through Christ’s power? Anyone denying this statement is mad. By the power of the same author who established fertility and mortality in this life, everyone will be raised from the graves, ‘so that each may receive what belongs to deeds done in the body, according to what was done, whether good or evil’ (2 Corinthians 5:10).

In the apostle’s saying, then, ‘As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ,’ do you think he indicates bodily death, common to the just and unjust, or that penal death appointed for the devil and the ungodly? If this ordinary natural death, which in the saints is even precious (Psalm 116:15; LXX/Vulgate Psalm 115:6), and happens equally not only to good and evil people but also to humans and animals—if, I say, the apostle indicates this death—then plainly ‘Adam’ denotes human nature, while ‘Christ’ denotes the power of the Creator who raises the dead.

But if you want ‘All die in Adam’ to mean guilt rather than nature, an explanation is available as plain as it is certain: As all—that is, many—die by imitating Adam, so all—that is, many—are saved by imitating Christ. Either he spoke of common death and indicated nature, or of sin and condemned imitation. So he added shortly afterward: ‘As we have borne the image of the earthly one, let us also bear the image of the heavenly one’ (1 Corinthians 15:49). Certainly assuming the image could not be commanded if it were considered natural in either quality.

6.32But let us examine the whole context of the passage. ‘If Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead,’ he says, ‘how do some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, Christ has not risen either. If Christ has not risen, our preaching is empty and your faith is empty. We are also found false witnesses about God, because we testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise. For if the dead do not rise, Christ has not risen either. If Christ has not risen, your faith is vain, because you are still in your sins. Those who fell asleep in Christ have therefore perished too. If we hope in Christ only in this life, we are more pitiable than all people.

‘But now Christ has risen from the dead, the firstfruits of those who sleep (1 Corinthians 15:20). Since death came through a human being, resurrection of the dead also comes through a human being. For as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then those who belong to Christ, at his coming; then the end’ (1 Corinthians 15:12–24).

6.33The outstanding teacher built his argument with great force and gave us hope through our shared condition with the Mediator. He maintained that this man, as regards the substance by which he is joined to us, possessed no exemption, and that the opinion adopted by unbelief could prejudice Christ no less than us. He therefore joins Christ’s case and humanity’s so closely that what is judged in one must necessarily be believed in the other.

At that time people had thought there would be no resurrection of the dead, yet they did not deny that Christ had risen. The Teacher of the Gentiles seizes this and pronounces that both sides must be open to the same judgment: either all humans are to rise, or Christ must be believed not to have risen. The apostle certainly would not have this argumentative force if, according to the Manichaeans and their disciples who teach inherited sin, he separated Christ’s flesh from participation in our nature (1 Corinthians 15:12–17).

6.34He would never say, ‘If the dead do not rise, Christ has not risen either,’ if someone could reply: But Christ rose exceptionally because he was born from a virgin; humans do not rise because they were born from a diabolical union. He would immediately answer: Then what was the empty point of rising, if it served neither our hope nor our instruction? What reasonable teaching or weighty example could there be if a nature unlike ours left us without both the hope of reigning with him and the power to imitate him?

The apostle’s faith stands far, very far from this opinion. Filled with the same Spirit as Peter, he knows Christ died for us to give us an example, so that we might follow his footsteps (1 Peter 2:21). Knowing that sacrifice and example were the purpose of so great a mystery, he does not hesitate to pronounce—indeed, carefully stresses—that Christ the human has reached no place from which any of us is excluded by our nature’s condition.

‘If there is no resurrection of the dead,’ he says, ‘Christ has not risen either. But if Christ has risen from the dead, how do some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead?’ (1 Corinthians 15:12–13). That is: If you acknowledge him, as human, to have possessed the same nature as ours, on what grounds do you either think resurrection occurred in him or will not occur in the rest? Having set out the conditions, he completes the judgment on every side: ‘But now Christ has risen from the dead’ (1 Corinthians 15:20); therefore there will be resurrection of the dead.

6.35Let us turn this force against inherited sin and say: If Christ, who became human, had no natural sin, how do some among you say inborn depravity rules God’s image? If evil exists in nature, Christ too, found in that same nature, is placed under the devil’s kingdom. If he is believed guilty, our preaching is empty and your faith is empty. The apostles are found false witnesses, because they testified against God that he formed his Son innocent and holy, from David’s seed according to the flesh (Romans 1:3), if the crime of cursed seed infected him. Certainly, if we hope in such a Christ, we are more pitiable than all people (compare 1 Corinthians 15:12–19).

But now Christ, no less truly human than truly God, generated from Adam’s stock, made from a woman and made under the law (Galatians 4:4), committed no sin and therefore had no sin (1 Peter 2:22). It is therefore clear that guilt belongs to will, not reproductive seed (1 Corinthians 15:12–19) (Genesis 1:26–27).

6.36The Manichaeans are surely pierced through, both for believing natural sin and for denying flesh’s resurrection. ‘But now,’ he says, ‘Christ has risen from the dead, the firstfruits of those who sleep. Since death came through a human being, resurrection of the dead also comes through a human being’ (1 Corinthians 15:20–21) (Romans 9:11). Here the apostle speaks not of the general resurrection, which even criminals and impious people will experience, but only of those to be transferred into glory. He indicates blessed resurrection by the unqualified name ‘resurrection,’ passing over the ungodly’s rising as though, compared with it, it were no resurrection at all.

Here, then, as I said, the apostle stresses not simply resurrection, common to good and evil people, but blessed resurrection. Resurrection and the blessedness of resurrection are not the same thing, just as resurrection and the misery of resurrection are not the same. Yet because eternal blessedness does not exist without resurrection, its name also indicates the happiness that makes being raised no cause for regret.

For example, someone praising industry, strength, and diverse pursuits may wish to describe them briefly under the heading of life: calling one person’s life learned, another’s elegant, another’s energetic. This certainly does not remove the distinction, as though life were identical with industry, elegance, or strength. Living is one thing, striving another; nevertheless you cannot strive unless you live. Likewise resurrection is not identical with blessedness—there is a miserable raising of ashes—but you will not reign unless you first rise.

Bodily death and bodily resurrection therefore stand opposite each other. If every death were penal, every resurrection would also be a reward. But the resurrection of all who are assigned to eternal fire is penal; therefore death too need not be punishment, but is natural. Just as bodily death does not in every case make dying regrettable, resurrection does not in every case make returning to life delightful. The good in the latter lies in the reward of those rising, and the bitterness in the former in the burning of those punished; both follow according to deserts.

It is therefore clear that the apostle discusses not natural death but the death of criminals, made unhappy by perpetual punishment; not common resurrection but the resurrection made blessed by everlasting glory. Where he discusses persons he does not prejudice created natures. He always preserves the distinctions and broad boundaries of natures and wills, sometimes combining terms without letting confusion destroy the particular character of things.

‘Death through a human being, and resurrection of the dead through a human being’: he does not announce here that death was created by a human, but appeared in a human. Likewise he does not say resurrection was effected by a human—that is, by Christ as human—but in a human. So the same teacher says to the Philippians: ‘He became obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore God also exalted him and gave him the name above every name’ (Philippians 2:8–9).

The apostle Peter’s assertion agrees: ‘People of Israel, listen: Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved by God among you, you killed through the hands of the wicked. God raised him, releasing the pains of the underworld.’ Again: ‘God raised this Jesus, of whom we are all witnesses’ (Acts 2:22–24, 32). There it belonged to humanity to undergo death without injury to divinity, and to divinity to raise that man from the dead. Yet what God is declared to do, Christ himself also does in the person of the Word. For he had said: ‘I have power to lay down my life, and power to take it up’ (John 10:18). Although the Son is one person, a proper distinction attributes one thing to flesh, another to divinity.

Death through a human, then, and resurrection of the dead through a human: manifested, not created. Both were established by God. But death’s condition became evident in Adam, and resurrection’s firstfruits in Christ’s person. Here, where the apostle says, ‘Death through a human,’ if you mean through his will, it concerns no nature; if through nature, it concerns no fault. He placed two human beings opposite one another, one associated with death, the other with resurrection, refusing to subordinate the second to the first.

It follows: ‘As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ’ (1 Corinthians 15:22). Does ‘All will be made alive in Christ’ include the ungodly, or refer only to believers? If to the ungodly, because everyone is made alive in Christ, no one is punished. If to believers, then not everyone is made alive in Christ’s faith, but only believers, although absolutely everyone is raised by the same power through which they were created.

If he speaks of bodily death—‘All die in Adam’—this name indicates no guilt, since Christ too is found to have died in that same Adam. The reality of resurrection would not have followed unless the reality of death came first. The apostle therefore pronounces that all die in Adam. If this death indicates nothing other than bodily dissolution, it plainly concerns no natural sin and prejudices no innocent people: they are said to die in Adam, in whom Christ also died.

But if you want ‘All die in Adam’ to concern sin of the soul—not mere death, but guilty and miserable death, followed by the punishment assigned to crimes—then neither Christ nor the saints could be in that Gehenna. It therefore prejudices no innocent people either, who possess no voluntary evil just as they possess no voluntary good, but have only this: they were made by God. We consecrate them through baptism’s rite, so that the one who made them good by creating them may make them better by renewing and adopting them. Thus the apostle’s saying, ‘As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ,’ is as far from the suspicion of Manichaean inherited sin as Christ is from sin: he possessed no iniquity, yet lacked nothing of human nature.

6.37‘But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then those who belong to Christ at his coming; then the end’ (1 Corinthians 15:23–24) (Matthew 25:34). Elsewhere the same apostle says: ‘He is the firstborn from the dead’ (Colossians 1:18) (Psalm 110:1). ‘Then those who belong to Christ’ (Psalm 8:6): that is, the saints are caught up in the clouds (1 Thessalonians 4:17). After this, the end: these will go into the eternal kingdom, while the ungodly go into eternal fire (Matthew 25:34, 41, 46).

‘When he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, when he abolishes every rule and every authority and power—for he must reign until he puts all enemies under his feet; he has subjected everything beneath his feet—the last enemy, death, will be destroyed. When he says, Everything has been subjected, this plainly excludes the one who subjected everything to him. When everything has been subjected to him, then he himself will also be subject to the one who subjected everything to him, so that God may be all in all’ (1 Corinthians 15:24–28) (Matthew 25:41).

The kingdom of God the Father means that, when the number of saints contained in his foreknowledge is complete, every dominion and all the strength of hostile power will perish. The effect of so great a mystery must be to place all justice’s enemies beneath divine feet. This will happen when eternal death sees itself destroyed and defeated by all the saints.

When all those kinds of powers have been subjected to Christ and his body through the kingdom’s manifestation, the whole glorified congregation of saints will most certainly never cease to be subject to God. The entire body worthy of the kingdom of heaven, built under Christ as head, will cling to the divine will with perfect love, so that, with every desire for faults extinguished, God may both embrace and fill everyone.

6.38‘Otherwise,’ he says, ‘what will those baptized for the dead do, if the dead do not rise at all? Why are they baptized for them? Why do we also face danger every hour? I die daily, by the glory I have in you in the Lord. If, humanly speaking, I fought beasts at Ephesus, what does it profit me if the dead do not rise? Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’ (1 Corinthians 15:29–32) (Colossians 3:5).

If, he says, impious unbelief shakes this hope of future glory, in which God will be all in all, and denies resurrection of the dead, what will those baptized for the dead do? From this arose some people’s error: they think the early Gospel period had a custom whereby bystanders made the profession on behalf of corpses and even washed the dead person’s limbs with baptismal water. This plainly arose from ignorance. The apostle’s phrase ‘baptized for the dead’ indicates nothing other than what he said to the Romans: ‘We were buried with him through baptism into death’ (Romans 6:4) (Isaiah 22:13).

That is: Why do we approach baptism in a spirit of putting our members to death thereafter and living wholly as dead, if there is no hope of living after death? Why, he says, do I submit to daily dangers, constantly encountering the death persecutors inflict, so that I may boast before God of your progress, if the dead do not rise? Why, humanly speaking, did I fight beasts at Ephesus—that is, endure the beastlike fury of rioters—if resurrection of the dead is still uncertain?

‘Do not be deceived: bad conversations corrupt good morals. Some have ignorance of God; I say this to your shame’ (1 Corinthians 15:33–34) (1 Corinthians 15:28). Love of sins, he says, persuades you to distrust future things. People suppose there is no judgment so that they may sin more boldly. Those denying resurrection, he says, completely fail to understand God. You therefore deny not only reward but divine power, and should be deeply ashamed. I say it to your shame that such people can be found among you.

6.39‘But someone will say: How do the dead rise? In what body do they come? Fool, what you sow is not made alive unless it first dies. Not all flesh is the same: human flesh is one kind, animals’ (Daniel 12:2) another; birds’ flesh one kind, fish another. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of heavenly bodies differs from the glory of earthly bodies. The sun has one glory, the moon another, and the stars another, for star differs from star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead.

‘It is sown in corruption, it will rise in incorruption; sown in dishonor, it will rise in glory; sown in weakness, it will rise in power; sown an animate body, it will rise a spiritual body. Thus it is also written: The first human, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam a life-giving spirit. The first human is from earth, earthly; the second human from heaven, heavenly. As the earthly one is, so are earthly people; as the heavenly one is, so are heavenly people. As we have borne the earthly one’s image, let us also bear the heavenly one’s image’ (1 Corinthians 15:35–49).

He masters the difficulty through examples, saying that nothing is impossible when omnipotence promises the result. Just as he commends bodily resurrection through comparison with seeds, he explains differences among those rising through the variety of creatures. Yet throughout he speaks of the blessed’s resurrection. ‘It is sown in dishonor, it will rise in glory; sown in weakness, it will rise in power; sown an animate body, it will rise a spiritual body.’ This can certainly be fulfilled only in the saints. The ungodly are raised not into glory but into everlasting disgrace, as the prophet declares (compare Jeremiah 23:40; Daniel 12:2).

Here he appropriately distinguishes nature and grace, recalling the old testimony: ‘The first human, Adam, became a living soul’ (Genesis 2:7), then adding in his own words, ‘The last Adam a life-giving spirit.’ He shows that immortality’s gifts belong to the life-giving spirit, while a soul that merely lives belongs to a nature that will one day die. Living, then, he says, is not the same as life-giving. The life-giving one bestows immortality, which he assigns to Christ; the living one enjoys life but does not exclude mortality. He distinguished the two statements for this purpose: to show Adam was made living, but not immortal, while Christ became a spirit not merely living but bestowing resurrection—glorious for his own people, everlasting for everyone.

6.40‘But the spiritual did not come first,’ (Romans 1:3) he says; ‘the animate came first, and then the spiritual. The first human is from earth, earthly; the second human from heaven, heavenly. As we have borne the earthly one’ (Galatians 4:4)s image, let us also bear the heavenly one’s image’ (1 Corinthians 15:46–47, 49). He plainly turns to our pursuits, wanting the difference between our past and present conduct to be as great as that between mortality and immortality. ‘The first human is from earth, earthly; the second human from heaven, heavenly.’ (1 Corinthians 15:53–56) He uses the names of substances to indicate a difference of purpose.

Christ, whom he calls the heavenly human, did not bring his flesh down from heaven. He received it from David’s seed, from Adam’s seed, and within a woman from a woman’s flesh. ‘Earthly’ and ‘heavenly’ therefore refer to virtues and vices. The next words confirm it: ‘As we have borne the earthly one’s image, let us also bear the heavenly one’s image.’ So also to the Romans: ‘I speak in human terms because of your flesh’ (Isaiah 25:8)s weakness. Just as you presented your members to serve uncleanness and lawlessness toward lawlessness, now present your members to serve justice toward sanctification’ (Romans 6:19).

Following the course of his exhortation, he adds something that, unless understood, will seem to overthrow all he has said: ‘I say this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot possess God’ (Hosea 13:14)s kingdom, nor will decay possess everlasting life’ (1 Corinthians 15:50). In these very passages he has labored only to establish flesh’s resurrection, saying it would be placed in the kingdom’s glory. Now he pronounces that flesh and blood cannot possess God’s kingdom. If flesh cannot possess it and blood cannot possess it, where is the resurrection of the dead whose splendor he has been setting forth above? But, following Scripture’s usage, he calls vices, not substance, ‘flesh and blood.’

He makes this very point clear: ‘Look, I tell you a mystery: we shall all rise, but we shall not all be changed’ (1 Corinthians 15:51). The outstanding teacher understood that above he had reserved the word resurrection for future blessedness alone. Therefore, to remove ambiguity, he explains: ‘We shall all rise’—here is the common raising; ‘but we shall not all be changed’—here is the blessed’s resurrection. Change into glory is owed only to those who deserve God’s love rather than his anger.

‘In a moment,’ he says, ‘in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet, the dead will rise incorruptible, and we shall be changed’ (1 Corinthians 15:52). Here again he turns to the saints whom that day will find in the flesh. He says that in a moment as brief as the final ending of a sound, those who had died will be raised incorruptible—that is, whole—and those found alive will be changed into glory.

‘For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality. When this mortal has put on immortality, then the written saying will happen: Death has been swallowed up into your victory. Where, death, is your sting? Where is your victory? Death’s sting is sin, and sin’s power is the law’ (1 Corinthians 15:53–56; compare Isaiah 25:8; Hosea 13:14).

He shows, as often, that he speaks only of the saints’ resurrection. Passing over the ungodly’s raising, he pronounces it fitting that in the saints’ bodies corruptibility should be swallowed by everlasting glory. When this is fulfilled, he says, it will be possible to taunt the devil and perpetual death, which made this natural corruption seem evil. Then the saints’ joys will rebuke it, seeing that they have crushed death’s sting, and will say: ‘Where, death, is your sting? Where is your victory? Death’s sting is sin, and sin’s power is the law.’

That is: Eternal death, you had sin as a sting with which to wound deserters of justice. Had you not been armed with this sting—that is, voluntary sin—you would have harmed no one at all. You see this sin and this sting broken by faith’s strength. Our reward bears witness, the reward from which you tried to lead us away. Your sting was sin, and the power of your sin was the law, because ‘where there is no law, neither is there transgression’ (Romans 4:15).

Or, certainly, although sin was your sting, it became stronger—only in transgressors’ minds—after the death threatened by the law was brought to it. Yet the law was not given to sharpen it. ‘The law is holy, and the commandment holy, just, and good. But sin, to appear sin, produced death in me through the good, so that sin itself might become exceedingly sinful through the commandment’ (Romans 7:12–13).

This strength your sting gained through the assistance of our voluntary iniquity is now proved defeated and broken by believers’ virtues and believers’ crowns. We therefore taunt you, ‘giving thanks to our God, who gave us this victory through our Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Corinthians 15:57).

6.41In this passage Augustine thinks death’s sting is that ancient sin, failing to understand what follows: ‘Sin’s power is the law’ (1 Corinthians 15:56). He tries to identify this law as the command given to Adam. But that law was not sin’s power; it was the occasion of sin’s coming into being. Giving strength to an existing thing differs from bringing into existence what did not exist.

Eating from that tree would not have been evil if it had not been forbidden. Once forbidden and then taken through transgression, sin arose there from the encounter of prohibition and contempt. The law was not given for the purpose of wrongdoing. Nevertheless, in doing the same thing—that is, eating from the tree—the human would not have sinned, because the tree was good, unless tasting it had been forbidden by law.

What is wrong in itself—for example, murder of a parent, sacrilege, adultery—and is recognized as evil even without enacted law can rightly be said to gain strength through the law in transgressors whom prohibition makes more eager. But when an act is not wrongfully undertaken unless forbidden, the law’s occasion properly supplies its origin as sin, not its strength.

Since I have been rather lengthy here, I close this book too by reminding my reader to examine carefully and see that God’s law offers no occasion for Manichaean impiety. If any passages are thought ambiguous, let the reader not doubt that they can be explained according to the rules of truth and reason and made consistent with justice. We condemn with the same force, a force fitting God’s law, both those who say there will be no resurrection of the dead through Christ and those who equally oppose the apostle by asserting that Christ did not possess a body of our nature, thereby honoring Manichaean doctrines (Genesis 2:16–17).