To Florus 6.12

Next, 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.