To Florus 6.25

But why do we stubbornly think only truth’s reasoning should be followed, when our enemies’ battle line relies on the very dangers of life and rises against us fortified by miseries’ support? It wants to prove the transmission of faults and punishments into reproductive seed through the shame of intercourse, the pain of childbirth, and the sweat of labor. These signs—difficult births, sweating farmers, and thorny fields—are meant to make us believe in a natural crime for which the human race is exercised by so many troubles. Some think Adam’s sin made the race mortal.

I said ‘some’ because their leader Augustine was ashamed to say this. Writing to Marcellinus, he says Adam appears to have been made mortal. Yet with his usual elegance he adds that death was the wages of iniquity (compare Romans 6:23), and pronounces that the one he admits was established mortal according to nature could not have died. Those pronouncements in Genesis which afflict Adam and Eve are therefore commonly brought against us. It is now time to discuss them.

‘The Lord God said to the serpent: Because you have done this, you are cursed beyond all cattle and all beasts upon the earth. You shall go upon your breast and belly and eat earth all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed. She shall watch for your head, and you shall watch for her heel.

‘To the woman he said: I will greatly multiply your sorrows and your groaning. In sorrow you shall bear children; your turning shall be toward your husband, and he shall rule over you.

‘To Adam he said: Because you listened to your wife’s voice and ate from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat from that one alone, the earth is cursed in your works. In sorrow you shall eat from it all the days of your life. It shall produce thorns and thistles for you, and you shall eat the grass of your field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread until you return to the earth from which you were taken, because you are earth, and into earth you shall go’ (Genesis 3:14–19).

You take these pronouncements as evidence of inborn iniquity and proclaim that women would not have suffered pain in childbirth unless the misery of Eve’s childbearing had passed to them along with her sin. You want the punishment itself to prove sin, so that what the first woman earned through her offense cannot be felt by any woman without the same iniquity. ‘There would be no pain in the woman giving birth,’ you say, ‘unless there were sin in the child being born.’

I can scarcely measure how astonished I am in meeting these claims. Your opinion has supplied so many irritations here that I can scarcely bring myself to contest it. These objections contain more sins against understanding than syllables.