To Florus 6.11

The 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?