To Florus 2.28

Let us now turn to him. You had granted me that sin is an act of the will. I could immediately have said, as a consequence: ‘But infants have no will that sins; therefore infants have no sin.’ Yet to press you with more witnesses I asked, step by step, through what this sin could be found in an infant. Could it perhaps be through the will? Then, with your acquiescence, I adopted the premise that the infant had had no consciousness of willing. I added the question whether the infant had acquired the outlines of its limbs through the first fault. But you had conceded that God shapes them and that they are therefore good. Third, I asked whether you thought guilt was brought in through the soul’s arrival. Yet it was established that this soul was new and owed nothing to the seed. Next I asked whether, since nothing in these things remained for you to accuse, you called marriage—that is, the union of bodies—the devil’s work. But, again with your agreement, I showed that this belongs to the parents’ activity. Once everything mentioned above had been acquitted, your doctrine of transmission enslaved to the devil the married people who had caused the sin. After all this I drove home the consequence approaching you: you believe the devil is the creator of bodies, since you assigned to him the work of sexual union without which bodies could not originate. This argument showed the disease oppressing you. The second showed both how pitiable you are with such views and how invincible the catholics remain, supported even by your fear. You conceded that God makes human beings, that married people are innocent, and that infants perform no acts on their own. From these three premises it was irrefutably inferred that, when the one born does not sin, the one who fathered the child does not sin, and the one who created the child does not sin, no crack remains through which sin can be shown to have entered. If you dislike the conclusion, then deny your concession. Say that either the one who fathered the child sinned, or the one who created the child, or the child who was born. Of these alternatives, one is insane, another Manichaean, and the third goes beyond the Manichaeans: insane if you say infants commit offenses; Manichaean if you accuse married people; beyond the Manichaeans if you consider God the author of sin. But if all these things are so far from the truth that you still fear to confess them openly, with what shamelessness, most senseless of men, do you persist in denying the conclusion we have drawn?