To Florus 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’ (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.