To Florus 6.8

He thinks, therefore, that praising those first humans—just two people—helps him maintain a distinction between Manichaeans and advocates of inherited sin. It is hard to encounter anything more outrageous or shameless than this opinion. Freedom of choice, he says, lost its strength once it began to exercise itself.

Let us turn to him and carefully investigate each point. You admit, do you not, that the first human was made with free will, created good by God, and polluted by no corruption of sin at the outset? Yet, though his original condition was innocent, he afterward transgressed voluntarily and imposed on everyone to be born from him an unavoidable compulsion to sin. This is certainly your doctrine, which we testify was drawn from Mani’s mud. For Mani also regards Adam’s own nature as naturally evil, although formed from the flower of the first substance and far better than those who followed.