To Florus · §1.82

To Florus 1.82

A person can therefore possess a good that is his own precisely because he also has the capacity to do evil. The entire fullness of divine judgment is so closely bound up with this human freedom that whoever recognizes one knows both. Consequently, whoever violates one violates both. Let the freedom of human choice therefore be preserved just as divine fairness is preserved. This is the understanding of free choice that has subjected belief in fate, the calculations of Chaldean astrologers, and the fantasies of the Manichaeans to the Church's truth. This is the understanding that shows you too, along with those we have listed, to be strangers to Christ. Freedom of choice, then, is the capacity either to commit or to avoid sin, free from compelling necessity. It has within its own authority which of the alternatives that arise it follows: either the steep and rugged heights of the virtues or the sunken marshes of pleasures.

Latin source witness