To Florus 6.22

Time 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.