To Florus 6.9

For the present, then, we must first expose the dullness of your thinking, and then show—as we have often done already—that you never step even one foot away from the Manichaeans’ hovels and brothels. To begin with, it is utterly mad to think an act of choice was mixed into reproductive seed and the operations of wills took root in conceptions. You abolish the clearest and widest distinction between natures and pursuits, and then say the first humans’ will reproduced itself in their descendants. Everything in existence struggles against this error.

Orators’ sons never brought the elegance of their fathers’ art into their infant cries; actors’ offspring did not stretch their hands in trained gestures to accompany words; warriors’ sons did not demand a trumpet from the crowd. We may pursue examples of every kind on this pattern, all sounding together more clearly than thunder. The whole of things answers that nature has one set of boundaries, will another, and the conditions of reproductive seed cannot be penetrated by the desires of chosen pursuits. It has therefore proved a belief of the dullest, most abject stupidity to think that something admittedly voluntary was transformed into nature.

But your other claim is far, far more disgraceful: you say the capacity to act was consumed when action began. Free will is simply the capacity to sin and not to sin, subject to no compulsion on either side, but able by its own choice to stand on whichever side it wants. Yet you say that once it began to will one side, it lost the ability to choose either.